Stammering, Its Cause and Cure Part 1

Stammering, Its Cause and Cure.

by Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue.

PREFACE

Considerably more than a third of a century has elapsed since I purchased my first book on stammering. I still have that quaint little book made up in its typically English style with small pages, small type and yellow paper back--the work of an English author whose obtuse and half-baked theories certainly lent no clarity to the stammerer's understanding of his trouble. Since that first purchase my library of books on stammering has grown until it is perhaps the largest individual collection in the world. I have read these books--many of them several times, pondered over the obscurities in some, smiled at the absurdities in others and benefited by the truths in a few. Yet, with all their profound explanations of theories and their verbose defense of hopelessly unscientific methods, the stammerer would be disappointed indeed, should he attempt to find in the entire collection a practical and understandable discussion of his trouble.

This insufficiency of existing books on stammering has encouraged me to bring out the present volume. It is needed. I know this--because I spent almost twenty years of my life in a well-nigh futile search for the very knowledge herein revealed. I haunted the libraries, was a familiar figure in book stores and a frequent visitor to the second-hand dealer. Yet these efforts brought me comparatively little--not one-tenth the information that this book contains.

Perhaps it is but a colossal conceit that prompts me to offer this volume to those who stutter and stammer as I did. Yet, I cannot but believe that almost twenty years' personal experience as a stammerer plus more than twenty-eight years' experience in curing speech disorders has supplied me with an intensely practical, valuable and worth-while knowledge on which to base this book.

After having stammered for twenty years you have pretty well run the whole gamut of mockery, humiliation and failure. You understand the stammerer's feelings, his mental processes and his peculiarities.

And when you add to this more than a quarter of a century, every waking hour of which has been spent in alleviating the stammerer's difficulty--and successfully, too--you have a ground-work of first-hand information that tends toward facts instead of fiction and toward practice instead of theory.

These are my qualifications.

I have spent a life-time in studying stammering, stuttering and kindred speech defects. I have written this book out of the fullness of that experience--I might almost say out of my daily work. I have made no attempt at literary style or rhetorical excellence and while the work may be homely in expression the information it contains is definite and positive--and what is more important--it is authoritative.

I hope the reader will find the book useful--yes, and helpful. I hope he will find in it the way to Freedom of Speech--his birthright and the birthright of every man.

BENJAMIN NATHANIEL BOGUE

Indianapolis September, 1929

STAMMERING

Its Cause and Cure

PART I

MY LIFE AS A STAMMERER

CHAPTER I

STARTING LIFE UNDER A HANDICAP

I was laughed at for nearly twenty years because I stammered. I found school a burden, college a practical impossibility and life a misery because of my affliction.

I was born in Wabash county, Indiana, and as far back as I can remember, there was never a time when I did not stammer or stutter. So far as I know, the halting utterance came with the first word I spoke and for almost twenty years this difficulty continued to dog me relentlessly.

When six years of age, I went to the little school house down the road, little realizing what I was to go through with there before I left.

Previous to the time I entered school, those around me were my family, my relatives and my friends--people who were very kind and considerate, who never spoke of my difficulty in my presence, and certainly never laughed at me.

At school, it was quite another matter. It was fun for the other boys to hear me speak and it was common pastime with them to get me to talk whenever possible. They would jibe and jeer--and then ask, "What did you say? Why don't you learn to talk English?" Their best entertainment was to tease and mock me until I became angry, taunt me when I did, and ridicule me at every turn.

It was not only in the school yard and going to and from school that I suffered--but also in cla.s.s. When I got up to recite, what a spectacle I made, hesitating over every other word, stumbling along, gasping for breath, waiting while speech returned to me. And how they laughed at me--for then I was helpless to defend myself. True, my teachers tried to be kind to me, but that did not make me talk normally like other children, nor did it always prevent the others from laughing at me.

The reader can imagine my state of mind during these school days. I fairly hated even to start to school in the morning--not because I disliked to go to school, but because I was sure to meet some of my taunting comrades, sure to be humiliated and laughed at because I stammered. And having reached the school room I had to face the prospect of failing every time I stood up on my feet and tried to recite.

There were four things I looked forward to with positive dread--the trip to school, the recitations in cla.s.s, recess in the school yard and the trip home again. It makes me shudder even now to think of those days--the dread with which I left that home of mine every school day morning, the nervous strain, the torment and torture, and the constant fear of failure which never left me. Imagine my thoughts as I left parents and friends to face the ribald laughter of those who did not understand. I asked myself: "Well, what new disgrace today? Whom will I meet this morning? What will the teacher say when I stumble? How shall I get through recess? What is the easiest way home?"

These and a hundred other questions, born of nervousness and fear, I asked myself morning after morning. And day after day, as the hours dragged by, I would wonder, "Will this day NEVER end? Will I NEVER get out of this?"

Such was my life in school. And such is the daily life of thousands of boys and hundreds of girls--a life of dread, of constant fear, of endless worry and unceasing nervousness.

But, as I look back at the boys and girls who helped to make life miserable for me in school, I feel for them only kindness. I bear no malice. They did no more than their fathers and mothers, many of them, would have done. They little realized what they were doing. They had no intention to do me personal injury, though there is no question in my mind but that they made my trouble worse. They did not know how terribly they were punishing me. They saw in my affliction only fun, while I saw in it--only misery.

CHAPTER II

MY FIRST ATTEMPT TO BE CURED

I can remember very clearly the positive fear which always accompanied a visit to our friends or neighbors, or the advent of visitors at my home. Many a time I did not have what I desired to eat because I was afraid to ask for it. When I did ask, every eye was turned on me, and the looks of the strangers, with now and then a half-suppressed smile, worked me up to a nervous state that was almost hysterical, causing me to stutter worse than at any other time.

At one time--I do not remember what the occasion was--a number of people had come to visit us. A large table had been set and loaded with good things. We sat down, the many dishes were pa.s.sed around the table, as was the custom at our home, and I said not a word. But before long the first helping was gone--a hungry boy soon cleans his plate--and I was about to ask for more when I bethought myself. "Please pa.s.s--" I could never do it--"p" was one of the hard sounds for me. "Please pa.s.s--" No, I couldn't do it. So busying myself with the things that were near at hand and helping myself to those things which came my way, I made out the meal--but I got up from the table hungry and with a deeper consciousness of the awfulness of my affliction. Slowly it began to dawn on me that as long as I stammered I was doomed to do without much of the world's goods. I began to see that although I might for a time sit at the World's Table of Good Things in Life I could hope to have little save that which someone pa.s.sed on to me gratuitously.

As long as I was at home with my parents, life went along fairly well.

They understood my difficulty, they sympathized with me, and they looked at my trouble in the same light as myself--as an affliction much to be regretted. At home I was not required to do anything which would embarra.s.s me or cause me to become highly excited because of my straining to talk, but on the other hand I was permitted to do things which I could do well, without talking to any one.

The time was coming, however, when it would be "Sink or Swim" for me, since it would not be many years until a sense of duty, if nothing else, would send me out to make my own way. This time comes to all boys. It was soon to be MY task to face the world--to make a living for myself. And this was a thing which, strangely enough for a boy of my age, I began to think about. I had some experience in meeting people and in trying to transact some of the minor business connected with our farm and I found out that I had no chance along that line as long as I stammered.

And yet it seemed as if I was to be compelled to continue to stammer the rest of my life, for my condition was getting worse every day. This was very clear to me--and very plain to my parents. They were anxious to do something for me and do it quickly, so they called in a skilled physician. They told him about my trouble. He gave me a cursory examination and decided that my stuttering was caused by nervousness, and gave me some very distasteful medicine, which I was compelled to take three times a day. This medicine did me no good. I took it for five years, but there was no progress made toward curing my stuttering.

The reason was simple. Stuttering cannot be cured by bitter medicine.

The physician was using the wrong method. He was treating the effect and not the cause. He was of the opinion that it was the nervousness that caused my stuttering, whereas the fact of the matter was, it was my stuttering that caused the nervousness.

I do not blame this physician in the least because of his failure, for he was not an expert on the subject of speech defects. While he was a medical man of known ability, he had not made a study of speech disorders and knew practically nothing about either the cause or cure of stammering or stuttering. Even today, prominent medical men will tell you that their profession has given little or no attention to defects of speech and take little interest in such cases.

Some time later, after the physician had failed to benefit me, a traveling medicine man came to our community, set up his tent, and stayed for a week. Of course, like all traveling medicine men, his remedies were cure-alls. One night in making his talk before the crowd, he mentioned the fact that his wonderful concoction, taken with the pamphlet that he would furnish, both for the sum of one dollar, would cure stammering. I didn't have the dollar, so I did not buy. But the next day I went back, and I took the dollar along. He got my dollar, and I still have the book. Of course, I received no benefit whatever. I later came to the conclusion that the medicine man had been in the neighborhood long enough to have pointed out to him "BEN BOGUE'S BOY WHO STUTTERS" (as I was known) and had decided that when I was in his audience a hint or two on the virtues of his wonderful remedy in cases of stammering, would be sufficient to extract a dollar from me for a tryout.

These experiences, however, were valuable to me, even though they were costly, for they taught me a badly-needed lesson, to wit: That drugs and medicines are not a cure for stammering.

Many of the people who came in contact with me, and those who talked the matter over with my parents, said that I would outgrow the trouble.

"All that is necessary," remarked one man, "is for him to forget that he stammers, and the trouble will be gone."

This was a rather foolish suggestion and simply proved how little the man knew about the subject. In the first place, a stammerer cannot forget his difficulty--who can say that he would be cured if he did?

You might as well say to a man holding a hot poker, "If you will only forget that the poker is hot, it will be cool." It takes something more than forgetfulness to cure stammering.