Some History of Stuttering Therapy Influences in the US

Been working on a two-part podcast about the most notorious stuttering therapy story in modern US history (Wendell Johnson’s Monster Study). In doing so, I wanted to see what influenced this person, and I found myself going further and further back.

University of Iowa - in Iowa City, Iowa - was the real expansion of our current approach to stuttering.

Education of Dr. Carl Seashore

The Speech Clinic at UIowa was in part founded by Dr. Carl Seashore (1908), a Swedish American who earned the first PhD in psychology from Yale.

You could write books about Seashore. That man had a full life, and an almost unbelievable influence. To be a white man in 1910. He spent most of his professional life at UIowa. He worked with the majority of men who would go on to greatly influence speech therapy for stuttering, including Lee Edward Travis, Wendell Johnson, and Charles van Riper.

And I couldn’t help but dig one more “generation” (doctoral student wise) back. What and who influenced Seashore?

Carl Seashore had a religious upbringing - his father was a lay pastor (ie a pastor that was not technically trained in any way.) He was really into math, literature, classical languages, but nothing like *music*.

At Yale, he studied under two men, who both had fairly short terms at Yale: George Trumbull Ladd and Edward Wheeler Scripture.

Despite the names, Ladd seemed to be the most religious of these two mentors, somewhat of a theologian. Both were as good as fired after a debate at Yale. (1903) Tragically, the specifics seem to be unknown… But the tension between them was in large part due to “new psychology” aka experimental psychology, which is what Scripture was all about, and “armchair psychology” of the past, which was more the focus of Ladd. Scripture was known to berate those who did ‘armchair psychology’ and had some choice words.

It’s clear that Seashore went more the route of new experimental psychology, following the ideas of Scripture. Additionally, Scripture spent more time on speech disorders than Ladd. So it seems more helpful to dig into Dr. Edward Wheeler Scripture.

Dr. Edward Wheeler Scripture

Scripture, from accounts, seemed extremely confrontational, and I’m projecting here, but I got the feel that he would’ve preferred to stay in a more psychology route, but he ended up focusing on speech disorders. His wife was involved in speech therapy as well, May Kirk Scripture. He would eventually cheat on her with the lab assistant, and then him and the lab assistant disappeared off the map while his wife took him to court. Nonetheless, they continue to work together for a few years after this, as they had co-opened a speech clinic.

He spends many years, back and forth, in the US, Germany and England. He had his own cure for stuttering - called “the octave twist” - where a stutterer would speak in an octave different than their usual voice. He said if done right, it would be “impossible” to stutter.

He also had major impacts on lisps and he coined ‘cluttering’. And he co-founded APA (American Psychological Association).

Someone who has done an absolutely stunning amount of research on the history of modern-day speech pathology is Judy Duchan.

Here is Duchan’s website on Scripture (as well as MANY other key people).

I plan to do more research, hopefully, about this history. But man, Edward Wheeler Scripture seemed like a real wild card that we just… take his word for.