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An otologist will be satisfied to read in English this foreign review of literature on hereditary deafness, accompanied by a study of thirty-two family histories. It is the first comprehensive book since the classic by Dr. J. Kerr Love, in 1912.
The author is a eugenist who expresses a desire to solve, by study of heredity, the differentiation between hereditary and nonhereditary deaf-mutism. The latter he labels, as do other eugenists, "acquired deaf-mutism" (an ill selected term, since the patients with either type are congenitally deaf). An excellent, though brief, chapter covers forty-six previous studies of the eugenics of deafness but singularly overlooks the writings of Alexander Graham Bell, W. A. Turner and J. Kerr Love, who, being workers with the deaf, were most familiar with the subject.
A brief two pages is given to the pathologic anatomy of deafness, the subject which most interests the otologist. But here the