Speech Restoration Via Voice Prostheses

This book contains a series of articles and summaries regarding surgical voice restoration after or during a total laryngectomy. Most readers will recall the pleasure patients feel when they are able to speak again after years of mute existence. A few simple questions are relevant to the articles contained herein. Firstly, how important is a person's voice? Is it for example as important to man as the dances bees use to convey essential information? Even the most superficial consideration must tell us that the function of the human voice is still more important as we already have a detailed body language of our own, e.g., when we feel pain,joy, love, fear, etc. Without doubt, speech is the basis of knowledge and surely it is the capacity to learn which characterizes the human intellect. Secondly, one may ask whether man was always intended to have a voice? A few every-day observations can provide us with an answer. When little children play together, for instance, they all speak at once and seldom listen to what their neighbors are saying. Obviously, this is b~cause it is not so important what they are actually saying as that something is being said at all.