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.