Throughout the nineteenth century in France, the National Institution for Deaf-Mutes belonged to the Ministry of Interior. This dependence defined the education of the deaf-mute (this was the term current at the time) as welfare—in contradistinction to other schools, which were the domain of the Ministry of Education. The division was regularly attacked, and led teachers and educators to question the authority accorded to doctors in working with the deaf. They complained that the distinction resulted in a lack of coordination in teaching techniques, and argued that a dedicated Ecole normale should be created to train teachers of the deaf-mute. These debates took on enough importance to be discussed in the definition of deaf-muteness in the 1883 volume of Jaccoud’s Nouveau dictionnaire de médecine, de chirurgie.

This paper will address the encounter between political, pedagogical, and medical claims for competence in the teaching of deaf-mute pupils. In the course of their attempted appropriations, politicians such as Watteville and Esquiros, educators such as Puybonnieux and Rancurel, and doctors such as Jaccoud and Bourneville tried to delimit the capacities of the deaf and determine their status in society. But in defining the deaf, these authors were shaping the role of their own discipline. Through a selection of the arguments made for moving responsibility for the National Institution to the Ministry of Education, I will investigate the struggles between the disciplines concerned and the role of those struggles in shaping both their writing and their positioning toward each other. I will examine how the authors quoted seek to assert the boundaries of their field of expertise just as much as their own knowledge: it was acknowledgment of this expertise that would guarantee them access to their object of study.