Earliest hearing-loss tests measured duration and distance of audibility

Evidence

Otologists quantified hearing loss by using tuning forks and made measurements of how long a patient could hear a sound or how far away an examiner could be before a patient could not hear a sound. Due to the limitations in achieving both accurate and precise intensity levels, early scientists focused their endeavors more on pitch and sound localization than other acoustic quantities. — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 73

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s core interest in how hearing impairment was historically assessed before audiometry existed.
• SEED: An article angle: how the history of hearing-test technology — from tuning-fork distance judgments to pure-tone audiograms — bounded what clinicians could even conceive of as hearing loss.