| AdminHistory | Dr Pierre Patrick Gorman (1924-2006) was the only child of Brigadier Sir Eugene Gorman. Found to have no hearing at all, his parents resolved to provide young Gorman with as normal an education as possible. He attended Melbourne Grammar, where he became a prefect and was active with the school library. During his school years under the guidance of the French expert Henriette Hoffer and coached by teacher Doreen Hugo, he learned to lip-read and to speak.
He went on to Melbourne University to do agricultural science and then education, completing his diploma and then bachelor of education-the first person born deaf to do so. He then spent a year in Paris studying the problems of children with disabilities at Dr Hoffer's clinic, and in 1952 he undertook doctoral studies under the supervision of Robert Thouless at Cambridge University's Corpus Christi College. There he became the first deaf person to gain a PhD.
In 1957 he joined the staff of the Royal National Institute for the Deaf (now known as RNID) in London, where he was in charge of library and information services. He also continued the work of Sir Richard Paget and devised the Paget-Gorman sign system for communication in deafness. It is a grammatical system that reflects normal patterns of English and is used by many speech and language-impaired children, their parents, teachers, speech therapists and care staff. |