Max Aaron Goldstein, MD 1870-1941
Founding Director of Central Institute for the Deaf,
St. Louis, Missouri

*Born on April 19, 1870 in St. Louis to William and Hulda Goldstein, German emigrants

*Graduated in 1892 from Missouri Medical College in St. Louis (which merged with Washington University in 1891)

*Interned at St. Louis City Hospital and did postgraduate work in London and at the University of Strassburg

*Became a nationally respected ear, nose and throat physician, educator and medical researcher

*Learned about ways to teach deaf children to talk from Victor Urbantschisch at the Vienna Polyclinic in Austria

*Founded Central Institute for the Deaf (CID) in 1914, envisioning a place where parents, teachers and doctors would work together to help deaf children. He started CID in rooms over his medical office at Vandeventer Avenue and Westminster Place in St. Louis, Missouri.

*Included within the original CID school the nation's first teacher training program for oral deaf education, which has evolved into the Program in Audiology and Communication Sciences (PACS) part of a consortium of programs known as CID at Washington University School of Medicine.

*Conducted early deafness research and published dozens of articles, spanning professional interests ranging from early audiological devices, medical procedures, lipreading, psychological studies of deaf children and hearing in animals

*Wrote two books, Problems of the Deaf (1933) and The Acoustic Method for Training of the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (1939)

*Established a hearing and deafness research department that came to be known as the place where the science and profession of audiology were developed 

*Founded The Laryngoscope, a medical journal still published today 

*Invented one of the earliest hearing devices called the Simplex Tube

*Started the Society of Progressive Oral Advocates, which later became the professional section of the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, still active today, in Washington, DC

*Started the St. Louis Hearing and Speech Center, still existent

*Was friends with Helen Keller, taught her the "Two-Step"

*Arranged a hearing test for famous baseball player Dizzy Dean after Dean was hit on the head with a ball in the 1934 World Series  

*Tried to have his own speech recorded, before calling a physician, when he suffered a stroke in December of 1940

*Died on July 27, 1941 at his summer home in Frankfort, Michigan

*Dr. Goldstein's grandson, Norman C. Wolff, Jr., and his great granddaughter, Laurie Miller, help carry on his dream today as members of the CID board of directors.