practical, valuable and
worth-while knowledge on which to base this book.

After having stammered for twenty years you have pretty well run the
whole gamut of mockery, humiliation and failure. You understand the
stammerer's feelings, his mental processes and his peculiarities.

And when you add to this more than a quarter of a century, every waking
hour of which has been spent in alleviating the stammerer's
difficulty--and successfully, too--you have a ground-work of first-hand
information that tends toward facts instead of fiction and toward
practice instead of theory.

These are my qualifications.

I have spent a life-time in studying stammering, stuttering and kindred
speech defects. I have written this book out of the fullness of that
experience--I might almost say out of my daily work. I have made no
attempt at literary style or rhetorical excellence and while the work
may be homely in expression the information it contains is definite and
positive--and what is more important--it is authoritative.

I hope the reader will find the book useful--yes, and helpful. I hope
he will find in it the way to Freedom of Speech--his birthright and the
birthright of every man.

BENJAMIN NATHANIEL BOGUE

Indianapolis September, 1929

STAMMERING

Its Cause and Cure

PART I

MY LIFE AS A STAMMERER

CHAPTER I

STARTING LIFE UNDER A HANDICAP

I was laughed at for nearly twenty years because I stammered. I found
school a burden, college a practical impossibility and life a misery
because of my affliction.

I was born in Wabash county, Indiana, and as far back as I can
remember, there was never a time when I did not stammer or stutter. So
far as I know, the halting utterance came with the first word I spoke
and for almost twenty years this difficulty continued to dog me
relentlessly.

When six years of age, I went to the little school house down the road,
little realizing what I was to go through with there before I left.

Previous to the time I entered school, those around me were my family,
my relatives and my friends--people who were very kind and considerate,
who never spoke of my difficulty in my presence, and certainly never
laughed at me.

At school, it was quite another matter. It was fun for the other boys
to hear me speak and it was common pastime with them to get me to talk
whenever possible. They would jibe and jeer--and then ask, "What did
you say? Why don't you learn to tal