The history of man is full of cruelty towards those whose sickness we have been unable to understand. For thousands of years, for example, deaf-mutes were treated as if they were dangerous to society. In many countries they were regarded as idiots and were locked up in asylums. Very often they were killed to get them out of the way.

In the sixteenth century a man came along who wanted to do something to help the deaf-mutes. He was an Italian doctor named Jerome Cardan who believed that deaf-mutes could be taught by using written characters. His work attracted great interest, and by the seventeenth century, a finger alphabet was worked out which was similar to the finger alphabet in use today.

It took another hundred years, however, before the first public school for deaf-mutes was established at Leipzig, Germany. Today, every civilized country in the world has institutions for educating its deaf and hard-of-hearing.