[When cochlear implants came to Denmark and the deaf began to hear].

Abstract

For several hundreds years, deafness in humans and deaf-mute humans has been a challenge to doctors and other therapists. During the last 50 years, it has become possible to treat deaf people. The reasons for this success in treatment and the introduction of the treatment in Denmark are the topics of this text. To make deaf people hear, patients were treated with electricity for more than two hundred years,in Denmark as well as other countries. This development depended on many important factors for a positive result of the treatment. The first operation of a deaf patient in Denmark was performed in Odense. Some years later the treatment began at Gentofte Hospital and later at Aarhus City Hospital. The start was slow, to some extent because of financial circumstances but also because the necessary equipment was not fully developed. There were also difficulties with selection of the most suited patients, training of patients, resistance against treatment from organisations of the deaf and from conventional teachers of the deaf. The problems were solved over a period of some years, and the population could soon see and meet patients as celebrities, i.e., previously deaf persons who could now use a telephone. More than 600 deaf people have now been operated in Denmark. The term deafness has changed its meaning, and probably there will no new cases of the deaf-mute in the future.