a living for
myself. And this was a thing which, strangely enough for a boy of my
age, I began to think about. I had some 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.

Some time later, after the physician had failed to benefit me, a
traveling medicine man came to our community, set up his tent, and
stayed for a week. Of course, like all traveling medicine men, his
remedies were cure-alls. One night in making his talk before the crowd,
he mentioned the fact that his wonderful concoction, taken with the
pamphlet that he would furnish, both for the sum of one dollar, would
cure stammering. I didn't have the dollar, so I did not buy. But the
next day I went back, and I took the dollar along. He got my dollar,
and I still have the book. Of course, I received no benefit whatever. I
later came to the conclusion that the medicine man had been in the
neighborhood long enough to have pointed out to him