Stuttering - History

History

Because of the unusual-sounding speech that is produced and the behaviors and attitudes that accompany a stutter, it has long been a subject of scientific interest and speculation as well as discrimination and ridicule. People who stutter can be traced back centuries to the likes of Demosthenes, who tried to control his disfluency by speaking with pebbles in his mouth. The Talmud interprets Bible passages to indicate Moses was also a person who stuttered, and that placing a burning coal in his mouth had caused him to be "slow and hesitant of speech" (Exodus 4, v.10)

Galen's humoral theories were influential in Europe in the Middle Ages for centuries afterward. In this theory, stuttering was attributed to imbalances of the four bodily humors: yellow bile, blood, black bile, and phlegm. Hieronymus Mercurialis, writing in the sixteenth century, proposed methods to redress the imbalance including changes in diet, reduced lovemaking (in men only), and purging. Believing that fear aggravated stuttering, he suggested techniques to overcome this. Humoral manipulation continued to be a dominant treatment for stuttering until the eighteenth century. Partly due to a perceived lack of intelligence because of his stutter, the man who became the Roman Emperor Claudius was initially shunned from the public eye and excluded from public office.

In and around eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe, surgical interventions for stuttering were recommended, including cutting the tongue with scissors, removing a triangular wedge from the posterior tongue, and cutting nerves, or neck and lip muscles. Others recommended shortening the uvula or removing the tonsils. All were abandoned due to the high danger of bleeding to death and their failure to stop stuttering. Less drastically, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard placed a small forked golden plate under the tongue in order to support "weak" muscles.

Italian pathologist Giovanni Morgagni attributed stuttering to deviations in the hyoid bone, a conclusion he came to via autopsy. Blessed Notker of St. Gall (ca. 840–912), called Balbulus ("The Stutterer") and described by his biographer as being "delicate of body but not of mind, stuttering of tongue but not of intellect, pushing boldly forward in things Divine," was invoked against stammering.

Famous Englishmen who stammered were King George VI and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who led the UK through World War II.

George VI went through years of speech therapy, most successfully under Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue, for his stammer. This is dealt with in the Academy Award-winning film The King's Speech (2010) in which Colin Firth plays George VI. The film is based on an original screenplay by David Seidler who also used to stutter as a child until age 16.

Churchill claimed, perhaps not directly discussing himself, that "ometimes a slight and not unpleasing stammer or impediment has been of some assistance in securing the attention of the audience..." However, those who knew Churchill and commented on his stutter believed that it was or had been a significant problem for him. His secretary Phyllis Moir in her 1941 book 'I was Winston Churchill's Private Secretary' commented that 'Winston Churchill was born and grew up with a stutter'. Moir writes also about one incident 'It’s s s simply s s splendid" he stuttered, as he always did when excited.’ Louis J. Alber, who helped to arrange a lecture tour of the United States wrote in Volume 55 of The American Mercury (1942) ‘Churchill struggled to express his feelings but his stutter caught him in the throat and his face turned purple' and ‘Born with a stutter and a lisp, both caused in large measure by a defect in his palate, Churchill was at first seriously hampered in his public speaking. It is characteristic of the man’s perseverance that, despite his staggering handicap, he made himself one of the greatest orators of our time.’

For centuries "cures" such as consistently drinking water from a snail shell for the rest of one's life, "hitting a stutterer in the face when the weather is cloudy", strengthening the tongue as a muscle, and various herbal remedies were used. Similarly, in the past people have subscribed to theories about the causes of stuttering which today are considered odd. Proposed causes of stuttering have included tickling an infant too much, eating improperly during breastfeeding, allowing an infant to look in the mirror, cutting a child's hair before the child spoke his or her first words, having too small a tongue, or the "work of the devil."