Office Hours

A visit to the office of UD history professor, Jaepreet Virdi

Ann Manser, AS73 April 27, 2020

Jaipreet Virdi was just 4 years old when a bout of meningitis left her almost totally deaf and struggling to adjust to her new reality and to society’s perceptions.

Over the years, her experience fueled a personal and a professional passion to examine how hearing loss has been viewed throughout history, both medically and in popular culture.

Now an assistant professor of history at UD with a doctorate in the history of science, technology and medicine, Virdi has developed a scholarly specialization in disability studies. “Technology is still my favorite topic,” she says. “I ask: How do you personalize technology? From eyeglasses to hearing aids to your iPhone? The answer is that people tinker with the technology they wear on their bodies to make it theirs.”

Her students like to tinker, too. They drop by her office with academic questions and often hang out for a while, testing out the audiometer, examining the prosthetic leg and—everyone’s favorite—assembling the “Visible Woman” clear plastic model with removable body parts and organs.

Looking over these collections may be entertaining, but all the items serve a serious purpose as Virdi pursues her many research, writing, teaching and public outreach activities.

Her first book, Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History, will be published in May by the University of Chicago Press, and she’s already at work on two other books, one about what it means to be deaf and the other a biography of an early scholar of disability. She also is continuing her work on “Objects of Disability,” an online resource database of historical artifacts used or made by Canadians with disabilities.

Virdi’s work has been recognized by the Forum for History of Human Science, which presented her its 2019 Early Career Award.

Take a look at some of the items in Virdi's office.

Assortments of hearing aids over the years “Some of these were works of art, but they were also meant to be hidden, which seems very strange,” Virdi says. One was built into the earpieces of a pair of glasses. Another could be worn as a tie clip by men or as a hair clip by women. There’s a theory, Virdi adds, that a lot of computer technology developed from hearing aid technology, which reduced the size of electronics for patient comfort and discretion.

Wizard Oil A bottle of Hamlin’s Wizard Oil, an American patent medicine cure-all. Like many  late 19th-/early 20th-century cure- alls, Hamlin’s was composed of mostly alcohol; in this case, 55%.

A model used in phrenology, a pseudoscience popular in the 1800s that analized the shape of a person’s skull and the bumps on it to ostensibly determine intellectual abilities and character traits.

Dolls for All Dolls that showed children with disabilities predated the Cabbage Patch Kids fad of the early 1980s. There were versions with leg braces and wheelchairs, for example, and this one wearing hearing aids. The dolls weren’t sold to consumers but were made for children’s hospitals and other healthcare providers to use.

The Vibrosage During the early 20th century, electrotherapy became a popular avenue for domestic medicine. People purchased hand-held massagers like this one for treating a wide range of conditions, such as arthritis, acne, deafness, psoriasis and more.

The “Visible Woman” plastic model kit was a very popular educational toy, first sold in 1960. “I have students who stop into my office just to play with this,” she says. She found it in an antique store when she was looking for a gift for her nephew.