Goldstein was born on April 19, 1870 in St. Louis, Missouri, the oldest of four children of Jewish parents, William and Hulda (Loewenthal) Goldstein. His father, a native of Poland, had come to the United States in 1853 and settled in St. Louis, where he became a wholesale clothing merchant. The upper-middle-class family was devoted to the arts, particularly music.
Max graduated from Central High School in St. Louis in 1888 and in 1892 received the M. D. degree from Missouri Medical College (later the Washington University School of Medicine). He received an honorary LL. D. from Washington University in St. Louis in 1937.
After a year's internship at the St. Louis City Hospital, Goldstein went to Europe for postgraduate study in otolaryngology in Berlin, Vienna, Strassburg, and London. He returned to St. Louis in 1895 and established a practice. From that year until 1912 he was also professor of otology in the Beaumont Medical College and its successor, the St. Louis University School of Medicine. In 1896 he founded and became editor of the Laryngoscope, a journal devoted to disorders of the ear, nose, and throat, which he continued to manage until his death. During his study in Vienna, Goldstein had become interested in the problem of teaching deaf children to communicate. Educators of the deaf in the United States were still not agreed on the best method - sign language, manual spelling, oral means, or some combination of these. In his work at the St. Joseph School for the Deaf in St. Louis, particularly with children who had some residual hearing, Goldstein became convinced that the "acoustic method, " the use of amplified sound, would facilitate learning to talk, and that the most effective approach lay in close collaboration between trained teachers, physicians, and scientists who understood the physical mechanisms involved in hearing and producing speech sounds. Securing the financial support of friends, in 1914 he opened his own school, the Central Institute for the Deaf, with four pupils and two women teachers in a tiny apartment above his medical office. Goldstein experimented with many means of auditory amplification and with the use of music for acoustic stimulation. As the institute grew, its goals broadened to include the training of teachers, outpatient clinics, and research in the hereditary, physiological, and psychological factors involved in defects of hearing and speech. The Central Institute, which in 1931 was affiliated with Washington University, by 1969 had a staff of nearly a hundred workers and had gained worldwide influence. In 1917, in an effort to rally all those interested in the welfare of the deaf child to support the oral method, Goldstein established the Society of Progressive Oral Advocates; he was its president until 1939. Its special goals were to promote closer cooperation between teachers of the deaf and ear specialists and to standardize the methods used in state schools for the deaf. In 1922 Goldstein founded Oralism and Auralism, a quarterly journal of deafness and speech disorders, which he edited until 1933. Goldstein had a contagious zest for demonstrating his methods before scientific and professional groups and young teachers in training, and an acerbic wit with which he rebuffed those who were skeptical of his lofty aims for the deaf. He constantly emphasized the need to marshal the resources of many sciences in the cause, and he tirelessly urged physicians, engineers, phoneticians, psychologists, and neurophysiologists to bring their distinctive knowledge to bear on the problem of deafness. Throughout his life he took an active part in the city's civic affairs, particularly community enterprises in the arts. In January 1941 Goldstein suffered a stroke, from which he recovered, but he died a few months later of coronary disease at his summer home in Frankfort, Michigan. He was buried in Mount Sinai Cemetery, St. Louis.
President of the Society of Progressive Oral Advocates (1917-1939), president of the American Otological Society (1927-1928), president of the American Laryngological, Rhinological, and Otological Society (1930-1931), president of the American Society for the Study of Disorders of Speech (1937-1938)
Goldstein married Leonore Weiner on June 4, 1895; they had one daughter.
