Symptom and Surface: Disruptive Deafness and Medieval Medical Authority.

Description: Explores how deafness is represented in some medieval medical treatises as a social phenomenon, "not an ill in itself"; in Teresa de Cartagena's autobiography as a "deaf gain" rather than "hearing loss"; and in Chaucer's Wife of Bath as a mark of her "disruption" of patriarchal "modes of textual authority." Together these medieval outlooks reflect the constructedness of ideas of disability and the need for modern diagnostic reform.