In 1878 Patricio Garc�a, a student at the Spanish National School for Deaf Mutes and the Blind, smuggled a note to the Ministry of Development in which he denounced corporal punishment at the establishment. The charges led to a high-level investigation that brought about fundamental changes at the school. The incident affords a behind-the-scenes glimpse of life at a nineteenth-century deaf residential school: the students� daily lives, their resistance to abuses of authority, and the unity that reigned among them.