Ever since the late 19th century, professionals from different disciplines have measured deaf people. Teachers and psychologists ascertained their intellectual achievements and psyche; eugenicists, anthropologists or physicians charted their family and medical history. The way this data was used reveals interdisciplinary coalitions and larger ideas about normalizing the disabled. Intelligence tests, for example were to be used for more efficient educational placement, but they also fed into a larger eugenic discourse that restricted access to schools of the deaf to the “normally” abled. Likewise, when schools started using audiometers in the 1930s and 40s, audiograms where initially meant for educational assessment, yet they also were useful in genetic research for tracing different types deafness in a family tree. The ways such data was collected and used often were pathologizing and gave little attention to deaf people’s perspectives. However, from the 1940s on psychologists and sociologists also became interested in the deaf as a social minority with a culture and language of their own. Interacting with local deaf communities, they grappled with ways of measuring normalcy and difference, and drew from contemporary theories of majority-minority relations, bias and discrimination, or sensory and cultural deprivation. Looking more closely at this research points to early origins of a sociocultural model of deafness and disability, which disability historians usually place with the activism of the 1970s and ‘80s; and provides insights to the different ways scientists and researched populations have interacted and established bodies of knowledge.
