In 1943, the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology formed a joint “Committee on the Conservation of Hearing” composed of some of the top otolaryngologists and acoustic physicists in the country. Working in conjunction with the American Federation of Organizations for the Hard of Hearing, an advocacy group incorporating different social organizations – educators, social workers, and speech teachers – serving the needs of the deafened, the Committee devoted its primary resources to tackling the problem of childhood hearing loss. Yet, the Committee’s agenda of implementing national and state efforts to secure periodic hearing testing was, in fact, largely instigated by deafened people who perceived the need for standard guidelines for measuring hearing loss as vital to their ability to receive medical and employment benefits. After the war, however, the Committee’s primary agenda shifted towards the problem of occupational deafness and industrial noise. This shift, from a disability-focused perspective to an occupational one raises crucial questions about how researchers approached the problem of measuring hearing conservation and protecting hearing from the effects of noise exposure. Additionally, this presentation addresses the implications such a shift could have for how deaf and hard-of-hearing people were classified under new standards of measurement.
