THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 9, 1995 TAG: 9504060437
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ANN G. SJOERDSMA
LENGTH: Medium: 94 lines
KNOTTED TONGUES
Stuttering in History and the Quest for a Cure
BENSON BOBRICK
Simon & Schuster. 240 pp. $22.
THIS PECULIAR BOOK had the makings, or so I thought, of an enriching learning experience. Having two male cousins who stutter, one quite profoundly, I was eager to learn more about this affliction. While Benson Bobrick, himself a controlled (not ``cured'') stutterer, imparts in Knotted Tongues much science about the nature and development of speech (mal)functioning and much history about the speculated causes of, and failed therapies for stuttering, he does so in such an uneven manner as to speak to neither clinician nor layperson. This is a dense, distant, idiosyncratic book throughout which interesting tidbits, and curious thoughts, appear.
Like an intellectual puzzle with mixed emotions, or an unanticipated tumble into Wonderland, Knotted Tongues is off-balance.
Two and a half million Americans, the majority of whom are male (4 to 1), stutter or ``stammer,'' words used distinctly or interchangeably, depending on the source. English writer Lewis Carroll, a stutterer who was deaf in one ear as a result of childhood mumps, parodied synonymously, and self-consciously: ``Learn well your grammer, And never stammer, . . . Eat bread with butter, Once more, don't stutter.''
Bobrick, who first became conscious of his speech impediment at age 8 and theorized its origin as psychic compensation for the death of his mother, also a stutterer, shares Carroll's propensity for wit and creative invention. A historian with a doctorate in comparative literature, he enjoys the interplay of literary allusion and social history, and quotes many learned people on stuttering, such as Aristotle in his treatise On the History of Animals: ``Why is it that of all animals Man alone is apt to hesitate in his speech?''
Bobrick intersperses literary references among fascinating anecdotes about famous stutterers, including Moses, Aesop, Demosthenes, Charles I, Cotton Mather, Charles Darwin, Henry James, W. Somerset Maugham, George VI, Clara Barton, Winston Churchill and John Updike, and commentary about the evolving medical understanding and treatment of the disorder. Again, the material is engrossing, but its delivery is inconsistent, choppy and sometimes stilted.
Hippocrates, believing that stuttering arose because the speaker's thinking outpaced his speech and associating the condition with ``aridity'' - the tongue being engorged with black bile - blistered the stutterer's tongue. First-century Roman physician Celsus recommended that the patient ``immerse his head in cold water, eat horseradish, and vomit'' and was an early advocate of ``frenectomy,'' surgery to detach the frenum, a sublingual ligament attached to the tongue. Even more radical surgery (butchery) found favor in Germany in the 19th century, when psychoanalysis also became popular.
Hypnosis, drugs, operant conditioning, electric shock, as well as breathing and articulation exercises, have been among the more civilized treatments for stuttering, a medical conundrum whose cause has been variously attributed to bodily humors, chemical imbalance, childhood trauma, repressed anger, overbearing mothers, infantile sexual fixations, guilt and physical deformities of the lips, tongue and jaw. Today, Bobrick writes, stuttering is understood as an ``inheritable, physically based disorder'' that is both developmental and neurological.
The author found his personal ``deliverance'' with Ronald L. Webster of the Hollins Communications Research Institute in Roanoke, whose work in the 1970s on the ``auditory feedback loop'' - studying the way in which stutterers hear their own voices - and speech muscle movement patterns grew into a successful therapy for stuttering control. Bobrick poorly explains Webster's breakthrough theories and those of his contemporaries, however. Had he chosen to detail his own therapy, rather than merely to announce its success, the methods and their implications would have been much clearer.
Bobrick speaks eloquently of the stutterer's ``invisible struggle.'' Having seen my cousin's placid face contort in a painful effort to simply utter a word, I know the visible struggle of that internal one. Somewhere between these two poignant struggles is the unifying book that Bobrick seemed to want to, but couldn't, write. MEMO: Ann G. Sjoerdsma is book editor of The Virginian-Pilot and The
Ledger-Star.
EXCERPT
Winston Churchill, a most sympathetic witness to the king's orge VI]
ordeals, achieved distinction himself as an orator despite a kind of
lisping stutter severe enough to resemble cleft palate speech. From a
very early age he engaged in prolonged silent struggles with initial
sounds, and (like his father) had particular trouble with the letter
``s.'' With some parental encouragement he used to pace up and down the
driveway to his home practicing such sentences as ``The Spanish ships I
cannot see for they are not in sight.'' When alliterative exercises
failed to help, he consulted with an illustrious throat specialist who
assured him that there was nothing physically wrong with his vocal
apparatus and that perseverance would prevail.
- From ``Knotted Tongues: Stuttering in History and the Quest for a
Cure'' by Benson Bobrick by CNB