3 ideas
David Wright, born in Johannesburg in 1920, lost his hearing to scarlet fever at seven. At first he did not realise he was deaf, because his mind kept supplying voices to the moving lips around him. He went on to a school for the deaf in England, then Oxford, and became a poet, so the loss was absorbed before he fully understood it had happened.
The decisive fact about a deaf person is whether hearing was lost before or after speech and language were acquired. A child deafened at seven keeps an inner model of spoken language to lip-read against and speak from. A child born deaf must build language without that scaffold, so the same label covers two very different conditions.
The book traces deaf schooling as moving between sign-based methods, associated with the Abbé de l'Épée, and oralism, which the 1880 Milan Congress entrenched by rejecting sign. Wright stresses that lip-reading is largely inference from context rather than literal reading, yet he himself defends oral instruction rather than condemning it.