Miriam P. Hardy, a co-founder with her late husband of the Hearing and Speech Center of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and whose work revolutionized the process of identifying and educating those with hearing and speech disorders, died Tuesday of heart failure at Sinai Hospital.
The longtime Dickeyville resident was 97.
Miriam Dorothy Pauls, the daughter of a newspaperman and seamstress, was born and raised in St. Louis.
Her interest in what became her life's work began as a child. When she was 5, she 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, she earned a bachelor's degree from Harris Teachers College in St. Louis in 1934.
While earning a master's degree from Wayne State University in Detroit, Dr. Hardy did graduate work at Central Institute for the Deaf, which became an affiliate of Washington University in St. Louis.
Dr. Hardy, who became an audiologist and speech pathologist, earned her master's in 1939, 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, she joined the Navy WAVES - Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service - and attained the rank of lieutenant.
During the war, she served in the rehabilitation center at the U.S. Navy Hospital in Philadelphia.
Before coming to Hopkins, Dr. Hardy had also been 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 she came to Hopkins, she met and married Dr. William G. Hardy, and with Dr. John Bordley, they established the Hearing and Speech Center in 1947.
Also with Dr. Bordley, they organized 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.
"What they established was the first speech and hearing clinic at any medical school in the U.S.," said Dr. Hiroshi Shimizu, who had worked with the Hardys and succeeded Dr. William G. Hardy as the center's director.
"They were both known nationally and internationally for their work," he said.
