However serious they were about discotheques, most researchers kept quiet about it for a long time. Then a glorious decade gave birth to two pools of disco studies. One describes injuries, illnesses and other ills that should or could be blamed on discos and disco music. The other tells about a world of exciting disco-inspired and disco-enabled – in short, disco-fuelled – investigations.
Dr MS Swani of Birmingham sounded perhaps the first cry of interest. In a letter dated 30 November 1974 in the British Medical Journal, Swani wrote:
“Early deafness in young people as a result of exposure to excessive noise in ‘discos’ must now be assuming epidemic proportions. The importance of this problem has been brought especially to my mind because an 18-year-old medical secretary who has worked for me has now been found to be suffering from this condition. If every general practitioner in the country had one such new case a year, there would be 20,000 new cases in the country annually.”…
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.