LIFE really began for Robert Panara on January 19th 1931, his mother’s birthday. He was ten, and awoke in hospital. His vision was blurred. He had no feeling in his right arm. When a nurse approached his bed and spoke to him he heard nothing. An attack of spinal meningitis had permanently damaged his auditory nerves; he was completely deaf.

American attitudes to raising deaf children had been liberal in the early 1800s thanks to an enlightened French educator who developed sign language, but by the turn of the century they had hardened. Alexander Graham Bell, appalled by the idea of “a Deaf variety of the human race”, loudly called for deaf people to be forbidden from marrying each other and for deaf children to be sterilised. The inventor of the telephone, who had a deaf mother and a deaf wife, derided sign language as “pantomime” and called for a ban on “manualism”—a disparaging word for signing. Deaf children should learn “oralism”, he insisted, even if forcing them to try to learn to talk all too often ended in failure.

The Panaras turned to specialists for a cure. One suggested injections to make the boy first hot and then cold; another strapped his head in a device that gave him electric shocks. Panara senior even arranged for his baseball-mad son to shake hands with Babe Ruth in the hope that the excitement might shock him into hearing again, though he balked at paying $50 for Charles Lindbergh to take him up for a “Deaf Flight”. Mr Panara was lucky in that, by the time he became deaf, he could already speak and read. Eventually his father left him to adjust in his own time. He filled his silent, solitary world with a passion for poetry; Byron, with his club foot, was a particular favourite.

Blindness cuts people off from things, but deafness, as Helen Keller observed, cuts them off from people. Mr Panara muddled through school, largely educating himself; he knew no one else his age who was deaf and nothing about how deaf students might best be educated. Yet he trusted his inner ear, holding to Keats’s words, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.” In a poem, “On His Deafness”, that was inspired by Milton, Mr Panara wrote:

“My ears are deaf, and yet I seem to hear

Sweet nature’s music and the songs of man,

For I have learned from Fancy’s artisan

How written words can thrill the inner ear

Just as they move the heart, and so for me

They also seem to ring out loud and free.”

His first experience of a deaf classroom, at 19, was, therefore, an epiphany. He marvelled at how the teacher, Lloyd Harrison, “made us learn without seeming to teach”. As his biographer Harry Lang later wrote, Mr Panara had yet to pick up sign language and did not even know finger-spelling. But he could lip-read and he watched Harrison’s eyes. He became fascinated by his “windmill-like hands and arms—the language of body and soul”.

Signing for Mr Panara became a pas de deux between the fingers and the face, a way of shading in meaning with the lightest of movements. Another 20 years would pass before William Stokoe’s groundbreaking “Sign Language Structure” proved that what many regarded as a crude, gestural way of communicating was, in fact, a complex system with its own grammar and subtle forms of expression. Mr Panara knew this instinctively, and he became determined to sign. Soon he was translating Shakespeare plays.

When he became a literature teacher himself, he was able to interpret in sign not just the overall meaning of a poem or a play, but also individual words, lines and quotations. “To see him”, one of his students said, “was to experience a continuous journey of discovery.” As a signer, Mr Panara made “sculptures in the air”.

The sculptor became an elegant and eloquent campaigner for a fully integrated education system for deaf people, one that mixed poetry and drama, sign and speech, hearing people and the deaf. Mr Panara had been to mainstream schools and would graduate from Gallaudet College, the first deaf college to be allowed to grant degrees. He went on to become the first deaf person to receive a master’s degree in English from New York University and was determined to tear down the wall that separated deaf and hearing people. In 1965 John Gardner, the secretary of education, asked him to help found America’s first technical college for the deaf, an idea that dated back to the 19th century.

Mr Panara was the first person hired to its faculty and became the first deaf teacher within mainstream higher education in America. Many of his students were deaf, but not all, and even the hearing ones were taught to sign and to lip-read. His wife, Shirley Fischer, became deaf when she was one year old, before she could speak. The couple communicated in sign; they used sign and speech to talk to their son, John, who could hear and who went on to teach deaf and hearing students at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, the school his father helped start. When it opened in 1967, no more than 150 deaf students attended mainstream American universities, most of them without anyone to help them with interpreting, notetaking or tutoring. Today there are 120,000 deaf students in college in America and deaf studies has become mainstream.