Stuttering Research Papers

Medical research has a dark history. For instance, research on syphilis was conducted in Tuskagee, Alabama on poor minority residents, dermatology experiments were performed repeatedly on prisoners, and a stuttering research project in Iowa is known as The Monster Study. Looking back, the details of these studies are horrendous. But hindsight is twenty-twenty and it is easy to cast a critical eye on those that came before us. Ethical standards are a relatively new concept born from the atrocities of Nazi experimentation during World War II. Prior to the Nuremberg Code, physicians had only the Hippocratic oath to guide them and oftentimes do no harm was set-aside in the quest for scientific knowledge. In spite of, or possibly because of controversial …show more content…
Up to this point, the predominate theory was stuttering originated in the brain, but that did not make sense to Johnson. In fact, anecdotal evidence, coupled with his personal experience as a stutterer supported another idea. He began stuttering as a young child and believed that parent response, worrying, along with the self-consciousness that accompanied his speech, perpetuated the pattern. In time, he became convinced stuttering was in fact a learned behavior which could be unlearned, stating, “Stuttering begins not in the child’s mouth but in the parent’s ear” (Reynolds). He developed a plan to prove his …show more content…
Even within the group of non-stuttering children who were told repeatedly and with a condescending attitude that they were beginning to stutter. Mary Tudor would write in her thesis, “All of the children in this group showed overt behavioral changes that were in the direction of the types of inhibitive, sensitive, embarrassed reactions shown by many adult stutterers in reaction to their speech. There was a tendency for them to become less talkative” (Reynolds). The impact of this research on these children was profound, damaging, and lifelong. It would be settled in court some sixty years