Halting Words

Fresh from Cornell University Medical College in 1902, Dr. James Sonnett Greene received his first patient: a youth of 20 who stuttered. Between agonizing pauses and machine-gun bursts of repeated consonants, the boy asked what could be done for him. Young Dr. Greene had heard nothing about speech difficulties in medical school. He told the patient to return in a few days; he would try to find out what could be done. But the boy did not come back. He killed himself.

Haunted by his inability to help that first patient, Dr. Greene decided to give up his general practice and do something for stutterers. In 1916, fortified by six years' postgraduate study in Europe, he opened a clinic in Manhattan for speech defects. It has since become the National Hospital for Speech Disorders, treating as many as 4,000 patients a year (and instructing hundreds of patients' parents).

Five to One. Last week, in the hospital's monthly publication, Talk, talk-conscious Dr. Greene talked about an old subject. It has been known for centuries that male stutterers far outnumber females (at the hospital the ratio is 5 to 1). But why? Some doctors think that it might be the difference between male and female sex chromosomes (which also influence vocal characteristics),* but they have never had any final proof.

Since boys are often slower than girls in learning to talk as well as to write, Dr. Greene believes that possibly "we expect too much of boys ... in their early years. Our expectations that they should attain the same level of speech performance as girls of like age, when they have not attained the same level of nervous and muscular maturation, may often result in feelings of inadequacy and insecurity, and cause [speech disorders]."

"Perhaps," Dr. Greene suggests, "if parents and teachers were to expect less of boys than of girls in the way of speech development at any given age level, there would be fewer male speech sufferers at later stages." The importance of the early years is shown by the fact that 90% of stutterers began stuttering by six.

Slow & Easy. Regardless of hereditary tendencies, the actual onset of stuttering always seems to be associated with some psychological upset. At the hospital Dr. Greene and the medical staff try to ferret out the cause, then to remove it by teaching "emotional control." The watchword of the institution is Relax. Patients of all ages are taught to relax, by physical training and just lying still--youngsters on mattresses on the floor, adults in underslung steamer chairs. The walls are plastered with signs: "Slow--Easy."

Stutterers are at their worst when embarrassed by normally fluent people; they do better with other stutterers, for then they have no sense of inferiority. Because a stutterer who has almost conquered the handicap serves as an encouragement, much speech practice is done in groups. About a third of the hospital's staff are former patients: they, better than anyone else, understand the problem.

* While stuttering is not hereditary, there are indications that susceptibility to stuttering is heritable: two out of every three stutterers come from families with previous cases.

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