Stammering, Its Cause and Cure by Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue (recommended reading .TXT) đź“–
- Author: Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
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STAMMERER APPEARS ILLITERATE: No matter how great the stammerer’s knowledge may be, he often appears to be illiterate simply because he is unable to express himself in words. His knowledge is locked up by his infirmity, the same as though he had a steel band drawn over his mouth and fastened with a padlock which he is unable to unlock for want of a proper key. The man with the locked-up knowledge is under as great a handicap as the man without knowledge.
A man who had a chance to be a big success in business, had he not stammered, says:
“Stammering is the cause of all my trouble. My earlier associates have shunned me for several years, and I have sought the worst class of dives and the lowest kind of companions, where I was reasonably certain that I would not come in contact with those with whom I had associated in earlier years. My eyes are wet with tears—tears of remorse and regret—because I see no chance in life for me now.”
The stammerer who thinks that success comes to the man who stammers—who believes that the business world is willing to put up with anything less than fluent speech, should read this heartbroken letter from a young man:
“I am a bookkeeper, and dearly love my work, but am afraid that I am going to have to give it up because my speech is getting worse, and I have noticed that the boss has mentioned it to me a couple of times now, and it almost breaks my heart to know that my position is going to get away from me. No one realizes how much one suffers, and I’m afraid I’m going to break down with nervous prostration soon. When one day is over with me, I wonder how I am going to get through with the next one.”
What are the results of stammering? Should anyone ask that question, I could point to instances in my own experience that would prove that almost every undesirable condition of human existence may be the result of stammering. I have seen young men who are business failures, dejected, hopeless, drifting along, men who in early years were intellectual giants, and who before their death were mere children in mental power, because they allowed stammering to destroy every valuable faculty they possessed.
I could point to children whom stammering had held back almost from the time they began to talk—give cases of young men depressed, embarrassed, unsuccessful, because they stammer—cite instances of all the worth-while things in life turned from the path of a young woman because she stammered.
Yet in the past, not one of these knew what was coming. Not one realized where the trail was leading. No stammerer can of himself see into the future. But he can, at least, look into the future of others, who, like himself, are stammerers, and avoid the pitfalls into which they have fallen and save himself the mistakes they have made.
It has only been a few years since the impression was abroad that stammering was incurable. Not a particle of hope was held out to the afflicted individual that any semblance of a cure was possible by any method. This erroneous idea that stammering could not be cured grew up in the mind of the average person as a result of one or all of the f ollowing conditions:
1st—The inability of the stammerer to cure himself and his further inability to outgrow the trouble, (although he was repeatedly told that he would outgrow it) was the first reason that led to the foolish and totally unfounded belief that stammering could not be cured.
2nd—The principles of speech and the un-normal condition known as stammering have been surrounded with a great deal of mystery in the years gone by. The idea has been widely prevalent that the affliction was one sent by Providence as a punishment for some act committed by the sufferer or his forbears. This and many other ideas bordering upon superstition, are responsible, too, to a great degree for the belief that stammering is incurable.
3rd—Even if an attempt to cure stammering was made, this attempt was based upon the “supposition” that stammering was a physical trouble, due to some defect in the organs of speech. It followed that since no one was ever able to discover any physical defect, no one knew the true cause of the disorder, nor how to treat it successfully.
4th—Unfortunately there have been in the field a number of irresponsible charlatans, preying upon the stammerer with claims to cure, while in fact they knew little or nothing of the disorder, had never stammered themselves, nor had the slightest knowledge of the correct methods of procedure in the core of stammering. The failure of such as these to do any good led to a widespread belief that there was no successful method for the eradication of speech disorders.
From an experience covering more than twenty-eight years, during which time the author has corresponded with 210,000 persons who stammer and has personally met and diagnosed about 22,000 cases, it has been proved that all of these beliefs are fallacies of the worst character. Given any person who stutters or stammers and who has no organic defect and is as intelligent as the average child of eight years, it has been found that the Unit Method of Restoring Speech will eradicate the trouble at its source and by removing the cause, entirely remove the defective utterance.
THE STAMMERER’S CASE NOT HOPELESS: Stammerers should fix this fact firmly in mind: Stammering can be cured! There is hope, positive, definite hope for every case—this fact is based on every imaginable form of stuttering or stammering. It is not, in other words, a mere idle statement based on theory or guesswork, but a mathematical truth, taken from experience.
I recall very well the case of a man of 32 who came to me for help after five of the so-called schools for stammerers had failed to afford him any relief. Quite naturally this man was a confirmed skeptic. He did not believe that there was any cure for him. Anyone who had been through the trials that he had experienced would have felt the same way. But he placed himself under treatment, nevertheless, and in a few weeks’ time, the Unit Method had restored him to perfect speech. He left entirely convinced that stammering could be cured, because it had been done in his own case which had so long seemed beyond all hope.
Many years afterward, he wrote a letter which I take the liberty of reproducing here for the encouragement and inspiration of everyone who is similarly afflicted and who feels as this man felt—that he is incurable:
“I tried to be cured of stammering at five different times by five different men at a total cost of more than one thousand dollars. None of them cnred me. Then I decided to try the Unit Method. Nine years ago I did so—a decision that I have never regretted. It waa evident that this method was based on a comprehensive knowledge of the art of speech. I am now a piano salesman and talk by the hour all day long; talk over the telephone perfectly; and many tell me that I speak more distinctly than the majority of people who have never stammered. I believe this is because I was taught through the Unit Method the very fundamentals of speech.”
This man’s case is typical of the hundreds of failures-to-cure which are responsible for the belief that stammering cannot be cured. The fact that he had made five separate attempts to be cured would, in the mind of the average man, establish the fact that stammering cannot be cured and yet it is seen that even in this extreme case, under the application of the proper scientific methods, the stammerer found freedom of speech without unusual difficulty and in a comparatively short time.
Not infrequently from some source will be heard a story, many times retold, to the effect that “So-and-so” who stammered for many years has been cured—that the trouble has magically disappeared and that he stammers no longer.
What is the cause of this? What brings about such a miraculous cure?
The answer depends upon the case. Usually, the story is much more a story than a fact. Few indeed have been the stammerers who have ever actually heard the man stammer before “his trouble cured itself” and then heard him talk perfectly afterwards. Like the stories of haunted houses, there is nothing to substantiate the truth of the statement, there is no evidence by which the story may be checked up.
In the rare cases where the facts would seem to indicate the truth of the statement, it will be found that the person in question never really stammered—that his trouble was something else— lalling, lisping, or some defect of speech that was mistaken for stammering or stuttering.
Another case of apparent miraculous cure is the case of the stammerer who, finding himself unable to say words beginning with certain letters, begins the practice of substituting easy sounds for those that are difficult and thus, provided he has only a slight case, leads many to believe that he talks almost perfectly. This fellow is known as the “Synonym Stammerer” and is usually a quick thinker and a ready “substituter-of-words.” If he has stammered noticeably for some time until those in his vicinity have become acquainted with his affliction, and then discovers the plan of substituting easy sounds for hard ones, he may for a time conceal his impediment and lead certain of his friends to believe that he no longer stammers.
This “Synonym Stammerer” is storing up endless trouble for himself, however, for the mental strain of trying to remember and speak synonyms of hard words entails such a great drain upon his mind as to make it almost impossible to maintain the practice for any great length of tune. In this connection, let every stammerer be warned to avoid this practice of substitution of words. It is a seeming way out of difficulty sometimes, but you will find that you are only making your malady worse and laying up difficulties for yourself in the future.
In an experience in meeting stammerers and in curing stammering it is only natural to assume that I have come across certain cases which could not be cured. It is only natural, too, to expect that in such a wide experience it would be possible to determine what cases are incurable and why.
Cases of incurable speech impediments may be divided into seven classes:
(1)—Those with organic defects; (2)—Those with diseased condition of the brain; (3)—Those who have postponed treatment until their malady has progressed so far into the chronic stage as to make treatment valueless; (4)—Those who refuse to obey instructions; (5)—Those who persist in dissipation, regardless of effects; (6)—Those of below normal intelligence; (7)—Those who will not make the effort to be cured.
Stutterers and stammerers whose trouble arises from an organic defect are so few as to be almost an exception, but where those cases exist, they must be regarded as incurable. The re-educational process used in the successful method of curing stuttering and stammering will not replace a defective organ of the body with a new one. It will not cure harelip or cleft palate, nor will it loosen the tongue of the child who has been hopelessly tongue-tied from birth.
A boy was brought to me some years ago by his parents in
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