The Malingering Ear: Audiometric Surveillance in the Early Twentieth Century United States

In the late nineteenth century, new opportunities arose for practicing that most venerable and ancient of military arts—malingering. The expansion of workplace benefits made "playing sick" profitable in a range of new occupations while the growth of the workforce militated against close surveillance of sick workers and soldiers. Feigned deafness, in particular, presented a promising field of endeavor for the malingerer. The cacophonous modern battlefield and factory made hearing damage plausible and the technical demands of modern labor meant it often unfitted one for duty. Most importantly, unilateral deafness was easy to fake and difficult to detect. This paper examines one front in the state’s turn-of-the-century war on malingering—the use of hearing tests as a form of surveillance. Beginning around 1900 physicians associated with corporate and military employers developed audiometric techniques to sort malingerers from those with genuine hearing damage. In so doing they participated in an intensification of the logic of surveillance, peering past workers’ behaviors and utterances to probe directly the content of their sensory experience. In this respect, audiometry represents a close relative (and predecessor) of the polygraph.