A Brief History of the Cochlear Implant and Related Treatments
The first cochlear implants (CIs) provided an awareness of environmental sounds and some assistance in speechreading (including lipreading), but no recognition of speech was possible with the CI alone. In contrast, modern CIs enable high levels of speech recognition with the CI alone for the great majority of users. Indeed, most of today’s users converse routinely via the telephone, even with previously unfamiliar persons at the other end and discussing unpredictable and changing topics. That ability is a long trip from total or nearly total deafness, and represents the first substantial restoration of a human sense using a medical intervention. In this chapter we describe five large steps forward that in retrospect led to the modern CI and related treatments. The CI is now widely regarded as one of the great advances in medicine and is a triumph of bioengineering, medicine, and neuroscience, among other disciplines.
