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This tribute was submitted by Sharon Willig, ASHA's associate director for clinical issues in speech-language pathology, in honor of a mentor, Miriam Pauls Hardy. It is adapted from an obituary in the Baltimore Sun on June 6, 2009.
Miriam Pauls Hardy, a pioneer in the field of communication disorders, was an audiologist and speech-language pathologist. She was a co-founder with her late husband of the Hearing and Speech Center of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Dr. Hardy died June 2 in Baltimore, Md. at the age of 97.
Her interest in what became her life's work began as a child. At age 5, Miriam began accompanying her older sister to work at the office of Dr. Max Aaron Goldstein, an otolaryngologist, who had founded Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis in 1914. At Dr. Goldstein's urging, Dr. Hardy earned a bachelor's degree from Harris Teachers College in St. Louis in 1934. While earning a master's degree, she did graduate work at Central Institute for the Deaf, which became an affiliate of Washington University in St. Louis.
Dr. Hardy earned her master's degree in 1939 from Wayne State University in Detroit and her doctorate a decade later from Northwestern University. Dr. Hardy worked as a teacher at the New Jersey School for the Deaf in Trenton and had been an instructor in special education at Eastern Michigan State University.
During World War II, as a lieutenant in the Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), Dr. Hardy served in the rehabilitation center at the U.S. Navy Hospital in Philadelphia. She had also been a clinical supervisor of hearing therapy in the special education clinics at Indiana State Teachers College in Terra Haute and the Aural Rehabilitation Training Center at Hunter College.
After coming to the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Miriam met and married Dr. William G. Hardy. The Hardys helped establish the Hearing and Speech Center in 1947 and organize the division of audiology and speech at the old Johns Hopkins School of Health and Public Hygiene, now part of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. According to Hiroshi Shimizu, MD, MScD, a colleague, the Hardys "established the first speech and hearing clinic at any medical school in the United States."
Before the 1950s, hearing loss in young children was difficult to detect, and many children were incorrectly diagnosed with a brain injury or behavioral problems. Children with speech and/or language disorders were labeled as uneducable or as having intellectual disabilities. According to Jeff Dubnow, current director of development at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, "Drs. William George Hardy and Miriam Pauls Hardy became the standard-bearers and most persuasive advocates for a population of children who ironically, never had a voice."
Among her many contributions, Miriam Hardy, along with her husband, developed a process called "psychogalvanic skin resistance audiometry" to measure hearing in infants as young as 7 months. The Hardys were among the first to formulate a team approach to help children with hearing loss recognize the sounds of speech, eventually learn to speak, and participate in general education classrooms. Dr. Hardy's interest in literacy issues led her to be among the first to characterize reading development as a function of language usage. She was a teacher, mentor and friend to many budding professionals in the field of communication sciences and disorders.
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