Medicine: Never Mind Marie

When she was a sophomore at Boston’s Simmons College 23 years ago, Marie Hays woke up one morning with a “woolly, thick” feeling in her head. Her roommate, closing the windows, shouted at her to get up. But Marie could not hear a word. Overnight, she had become deaf.

The college doctor diagnosed her case as influenza, and assured her that her hearing would be blocked only temporarily. Her mother prescribed travel in Europe. A specialist suggested that she take up lip reading. She consulted a famous Viennese otologist, who advised her to marry his nephew.

None of this advice improved her deafness, but Marie went on in life cheerfully convinced that she was only a little hard of hearing and could manage well enough. She married a childhood friend named Henry Heiner, and settled down in Cleveland.

The incident that changed her whole outlook occurred one day when she read the lips of a woman who was saying to a group of people: “Never mind Marie— she’s deaf.” Suddenly Marie realized that for years she had been kidding herself and giving way to a form of vanity that made her refuse to face facts. Soon afterwards she got herself a hearing aid. With it, she got a new life.

This is the simple story told by Mrs. Heiner in her autobiography, Hearing Is Believing (World Publishing Co.; $2), which this week goes into its second printing. Now president of Cleveland’s famed Hearing and Speech Center and a trustee of the American Hearing Society, Mrs. Heiner for the past 13 years has campaigned for a better understanding of the problems faced by the five million-odd deaf people in the U.S. She has promoted schools and clinics for the training of deaf children, advocated better job placement, arranged for special hearing-aid wiring in theaters, concert halls and churches.

But the adjustment to deafness, Mrs. Heiner argues, lies for the most part with the individual. Mechanical devices have worked marvels; surgery may bring even greater advances. The catch is, Mrs. Heiner says, that too many deaf people, because of false vanity or personal eccentricity, refuse to take advantage of their opportunities for hearing what is going on about them. Says she: “If you really want to hear for sure, a way will be found. You may have to ‘listen’ in some unorthodox way, but some magnificent law of compensation makes acceptable substitutions . . .”