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It has only been a few years since the impression was abroad that stammering was incurable. Not a particle of hope was held out to the afflicted individual that any semblance of a cure was possible by any method. This erroneous idea that stammering could not be cured grew up in the mind of the average person as a result of one or all of the f ollowing conditions:
1st--The inability of the stammerer to cure himself and his further inability to outgrow the trouble, (although he was repeatedly told that he would outgrow it) was the first reason that led to the foolish and totally unfounded belief that stammering could not be cured.
2nd--The principles of speech and the un-normal condition known as stammering have been surrounded with a great deal of mystery in the years gone by. The idea has been widely prevalent that the affliction was one sent by Providence as a punishment for some act committed by the sufferer or his forbears. This and many other ideas bordering upon superstition, are responsible, too, to a great degree for the belief that stammering is incurable.
3rd--Even if an attempt to cure stammering was made, this attempt was based upon the "supposition" that stammering was a physical trouble, due to some defect in the organs of speech. It followed that since no one was ever able to discover any physical defect, no one knew the true cause of the disorder, nor how to treat it successfully.
4th--Unfortunately there have been in the field a number of irresponsible charlatans, preying upon the stammerer with claims to cure, while in fact they knew little or nothing of the disorder, had never stammered themselves, nor had the slightest knowledge of the correct methods of procedure in the core of stammering. The failure of such as these to do any good led to a widespread belief that there was no successful method for the eradication of speech disorders.
From an experience covering more than twenty-eight years, during which time the author has corresponded with 210,000 persons who stammer and has personally met and diagnosed about 22,000 cases, it has been proved that all of these beliefs are fallacies of the worst character. Given any person who stutters or stammers and who has no organic defect and is as intelligent as the average child of eight years, it has been found that the Unit Method of Restoring Speech will eradicate the trouble at its source and by removing the cause, entirely remove the defective utterance.
THE STAMMERER'S CASE NOT HOPELESS: Stammerers should fix this fact firmly in mind: Stammering can be cured! There is hope, positive, definite hope for every case--this fact is based on every imaginable form of stuttering or stammering. It is not, in other words, a mere idle statement based on theory or guess-work, but a mathematical truth, taken from experience.
I recall very well the case of a man of 32 who came to me for help after five of the so-called schools for stammerers had failed to afford him any relief. Quite naturally this man was a confirmed skeptic. He did not believe that there was any cure for him. Anyone who had been through the trials that he had experienced would have felt the same way. But he placed himself under treatment, nevertheless, and in a few weeks' time, the Unit Method had restored him to perfect speech. He left entirely convinced that stammering could be cured, because it had been done in his own case which had so long seemed beyond all hope.
Many years afterward, he wrote a letter which I take the liberty of reproducing here for the encouragement and inspiration of everyone who is similarly afflicted and who feels as this man felt--that he is incurable:
"I tried to be cured of stammering at five different times by five different men at a total cost of more than one thousand dollars. None of them cnred me. Then I decided to try the Unit Method. Nine years ago I did so--a decision that I have never regretted. It waa evident that this method was based on a comprehensive knowledge of the art of speech. I am now a piano salesman and talk by the hour all day long; talk over the telephone perfectly; and many tell me that I speak more distinctly than the majority of people who have never stammered. I believe this is because I was taught through the Unit Method the very fundamentals of speech."
This man's case is typical of the hundreds of failures-to-cure which are responsible for the belief that stammering cannot be cured. The fact that he had made five separate attempts to be cured would, in the mind of the average man, establish the fact that stammering cannot be cured and yet it is seen that even in this extreme case, under the application of the proper scientific methods, the stammerer found freedom of speech without unusual difficulty and in a comparatively short time.
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