[History of the rehabilitation of the deaf child]

As a deaf mute, because mute and more often than not deaf, and then deaf and dumb, because deaf and therefore dumb, the deaf child inevitably deprived of spontaneous speech was considered up to the end of the middle ages as having no possibility of language or of thought, left to the sorry fate of being part of a sporadic population expressing themselves by gestures, a language bereft of past and future, understood only by a few members of the family or occasionally deaf neighbours. During the Renaissance, it appeared that with specific education the deaf child could talk, have a language, and therefore thought. Due merit must be given to 16th century Spain. In the 18th century, France discovered that gestures can also be a language, collated and constructed thanks to the collaboration of the partially deaf. From then on, gestual language flourished in America whilst the rest of Europe continued to prefer oral rehabilitation. With current medical progress, the deaf are no longer deaf. Deafness in the child still exists, however, but there are no longer any mutes. The deaf child can achieve access to language, which may be oral or gestual. The choice between these two modes of expression is still very tropical.