In Perspective
Thousand-Year-Old Speech-Language Pathologist Speaks Out
by Gerald M. Siegel
I’m the Thousand-Year-Old speech-language pathologist. I’ve been treating stuttering since antiquity. I don’t like to boast, but let me give you just a few examples of my clientele.
In the Beginning
My earliest successful treatment (which, if you’re interested, was published in an obscure journal called the Hebrew Bible) was for an Israelite fellow named Moses. You will recall that when God told Moses to advise Pharaoh to “Let my people go,” Moses was reluctant.
“Boss,” said Moses, “you know I can’t do that job. I’m slow of tongue, hesitant in speech. Let Aaron do it.”
No way. Sure Aaron was good at turning a staff into a snake or water into blood, and ordinary tricks like that, but the Boss was adamant that Moses be His mouthpiece. That’s when God called me in for my professional advice.
“I’ve got this prophet,” He said, “and I have a special job for him. But he claims he can’t do it because he stutters. What should I do?”
“No problem,” I said. “Tell Moses to climb a mountain, take two tablets, and call in the morning.”
Sure enough, the treatment worked, and it wasn’t long before Moses was arguing nose to nose with Pharaoh, with the Israelites, with Aaron and Miriam, and even with the Boss Himself. It was a great cure, but unfortunately I’ve never been able to reproduce the formula for the tablets, so it hasn’t been a commercial success.
The Greek Guy
Then there was a Greek guy named Demosthenes—I was traveling a lot in those days, from Egypt to Greece, wherever I could get work. Anyway, Demosthenes had the ambition to be an encyclopedia salesman, but he had a fluency problem. Again, I was called in to consult.
Knowing the tablet cure was out, I told myself, “There’s always more than one way to skin a catacomb. Think small. A tablet is a big rock. A lot of little rocks make up a big one.” Bingo! I got this Greek guy to stuff his mouth with pebbles instead of tablets, and to walk along the beach shouting, “I sell sea shells by the sea shore.”
Success again! Pretty soon the Greek guy gave up sales for politics, started giving speeches in front of the Greek Senate, and was acclaimed as a great orator. Not only that, he made a pretty drachma in his side business, selling ornamental seashells.
London to Hollywood and Beyond—More Successes
I’ve worked with all kinds of celebrities over the ages. I remember there was another big politician in England—Winston the Pooh or Winston something, I think. Anyway, he had a fluency problem too. And he had a big job. Had to give speeches that would inspire the whole free world to resist Nazi aggression. He had pudgy cheeks, so I didn’t even try pebbles with him.
But then I had another idea. I told him to hold a big, fat cigar in his hand, and to wave it around when he thought he might have trouble with a word. I have to admit, I got the inspiration for that treatment from a guy named Bogue (sounds like “bogus”), but he didn’t use cigars.
Anyway, that treatment worked too and pretty soon he was giving the most memorable speeches you ever heard. Boosted the sales of cigars also, which didn’t hurt my stock portfolio. I never figured he’d actually light up and smoke the things. But treatment doesn’t always work out the way it’s supposed to. Anyway, his stuttering went up in smoke (so to speak) and now everybody remembers him as another great orator.
Moving up a few years now, there was a skinny, but sort of cute young woman, name of Norma Jean. Believe it or not, she wanted to be an actress even though she stuttered. I didn’t discourage her. I figured she should have a right to try for her dreams. I couldn’t get her to do the cigar gambit, though. But I did teach her to purse her lips and use a squeaky voice when she talked.
I think that did the trick, but somewhere along the way she changed her name and I lost track of her. I don’t know if her acting career ever did come to anything. Later on I heard about a beauty named Marilyn Monroe who became a good friend of President Kennedy and Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller. She looked a little bit like Norma Jean, and she even pursed her lips and squealed, but it couldn’t have been her.
I had pretty good luck with a young fella named Mel Tillis, too, but not at first. He didn’t take to the pebbles or the cigar at all. Both made him choke. I tried the lip-pursing, too, but then he couldn’t get them unpursed. He was good at the squeaky voice, but he just didn’t want to go around talking that way all the time. I couldn’t blame him.
Then I had an inspired idea, if I say so myself. I said, “Mel, you do any singing?”
“N-n-n-no sir,” he said. He was very polite.
“Well, why don’t you try a few bars,” I said.
“I don’t drink,” he said.
“No,” I said. “I mean bars of a song. Singing.”
He sang a little ditty, and it came out fluent, but I wasn’t quite satisfied. It didn’t sound natural. Then the inspiration hit me. “Let’s combine two treatments,” I said. “This time while you are singing, use that squeaky voice we practiced.”
It turned out he was a natural country singer. When he sang, he was fluent, and he could carry a tune, too. At first, he wanted to sing Shubert lieder and operatic arias, but I convinced him he’d sound better on country music.
Well, he was getting discouraged and he said, “I’m tired of all of this.” And I said, “That’s it. That’s your song.”
So he recorded “I’m Tired” and in 1976 he was Country Music Entertainer of the year, and was inducted into the Nashville Hall of Fame. He’s been writing songs and singing his way to fluent stardom ever since.
For awhile, I seemed to specialize in musicians who stuttered. I especially enjoyed working with them because I knew that some of the experts, like Travis, were telling people who stuttered to stay away from music because it exercised the wrong part of their brain, and here I was healing their stuttering and advancing our culture at the same time. That was very satisfying.
I got to consult with another singer, named Robert Merrill. His goal in life was to sing country music but he could never master the squeak. It always came out full-throated and bel canto. I finally convinced him he had a better chance with classical music, and so he took up opera and he sang at the Met and all over the world.
You will notice that I don’t have a one-size-fits-all approach to treatment. I individualize it, so I can get the best success and, incidentally, charge the highest fees possible.
I could cite many more cases. I mean, I worked with King George, and the author Somerset Maugham, and more actors and actresses than I can count. But I know it’s boring to hear a long list of accomplishments. And, to be honest, I have to admit that I had some failures too. My own Dad was a stutterer, but I was careful and never brought it to his attention because I had consulted with Oliver Bloodstein and Wendell Johnson and had learned about the diagnosogenic theory from them.
My One Failure
And there was one group that I just couldn’t do anything with at all: academic types who specialized in fluency disorders. Whatever treatment I suggested, they criticized. They all had their own ideas and their own theories and they wrote their own textbooks and had their own approaches to stuttering. They insisted that they were the real experts and wouldn’t pay any attention to me at all despite my record of success. I didn’t know what to do with them.
Finally, to get them off my back, I created an association—I called it the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association—and I made them all members. Now they can argue and disagree with each other and write articles and call each other names, and be really professional.
I’m not going to go on talking about myself and my triumphs over the past 1,000 years. I know this hasn’t been a very scholarly presentation but, as you can tell, I’m retired now. I don’t suppose I would have written this sort of paper when I was still working. But even so, there is a message of sorts hidden in all of this frivolity.
I’ve been curing stuttering and making a good living at it for thousands of years. And no two treatments have been alike, though I will admit I presented each with much horn-blowing and celebration as “The Solution” to the problem of stuttering.
Nowadays folks are much more modest in their claims about curing stuttering in adults—well, at least we should be more modest. If we have learned anything from these many years of experience, it ought to be modesty in our claims for unbridled success, for children or adults. If you look at the treatment programs that are now pronouncing miraculous cures in preventing or eliminating stuttering, they have the same confusing diversity that I used all these millennia.
That should give us pause. I think that, in the long run, the best treatments—better even than tablets or pebbles or sing-song speech—will be those that are based on a solid foundation of research and theory into the essential nature of stuttering. Lots of folks are interested only in what works with persons who stutter. Of course that’s important, but I would urge that folks who stutter and study stuttering and really care about it should use their influence to promote and foster the basic research that will finally unravel the underlying secrets of this most puzzling communication disorder.
Then, maybe a thousand years from now, I’ll tell the young folks that I once belonged to an organization whose members were interested in studying stuttering, and they won’t know what I’m talking about. They’ll chuckle when I try to explain it, but they won’t really understand, because, by then, we won’t have a word for it!
Gerald M. Siegel is professor emeritus of the University of Minnesota. Contact him at:.