Sensory Futures: Deafness and Cochlear Implant Infrastructure in India—Michele Ilana Friedner (Minneapolis, MN, USA: Univ. Minnesota Press, 2022, 288 pp.)

Abstract

Experiments using electricity to stimulate hearing date back as far as 1748, when the portraitist and electricity researcher Benjamin Wilson electricized a covered vial through a wire that ran from one side of a woman’s temple to the opposite end of her head, bringing about an explosion and small warmth from ear to ear. An experiment from the 1930s made use of a living cat as a microphone, wherein an attempt was made to stimulate the cat’s auditory nerve [1] . If the electrical contact was successful, a listener could hear sounds spoken into the cat’s ear through a connected telephone receiver.