What Do You Know About Your Profession’s History?

Abstract

You have accessThe ASHA LeaderFeature1 Dec 2002What Do You Know About Your Profession's History?And Why Is It Important? Judith Felson Duchan Judith Felson Duchan Google Scholar https://doi.org/10.1044/leader.FTR.07232002.4 SectionsAbout ToolsAdd to favorites ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In Do you know who the first speech clinicians in America were, or what was the first journal published in the United States that emphasized topics about speech or language pathology, or when diagnostic tests were first used by speech-language pathologists in the United States? Can you name the important writings of Samuel Potter or Sara Stinchfield Hawk or Alexander Melville Bell'mdash;or Alexander Graham Bell, for that matter? Can you describe the contributions to the evolution of speech-language pathology of Smiley Blanton or Walter Babcock Swift or Mabel Farrington Gifford? I'm guessing that many of you can't. I base this prediction on my observation that there is very little attention given in our profession to our past, especially our distant past. In order to find out much about our history, you would need to go to the original sources yourself or to use secondary sources such as historical books, journals, or Web sites mostly outside of our field (e.g., Journal of the History of the Social Sciences, Journal of Special Education, and various Web sites). But I don't actually want to presume that knowing the answers to these questions is a valid measure of one's knowledge of our profession's history. The questions reduce history to a list of dates and to the contributions of a few people. It's as if one could measure a person's knowledge of the discovery of America by asking who did it and when it happened. Knowing about America's past as well as about our own professional history requires knowledge a great deal more in depth than simply knowing some important dates and famous names. Why did Ferdinand and Isabella support Columbus' trip? What might the Arawak Indians in the Bahama Islands have thought when they first saw Columbus and his men? Why did our foreparents declare themselves a profession in 1925, long after speech clinicians had begun practicing in America? On the other hand, not to know that 1492 was the year of Columbus' trip is a pretty clear sign that someone doesn't know much else about that trip. Similarly, not knowing the names and dates of important events in our own history may indicate that the test taker needs to know more about the more profound aspects of our collective historical past. With that in mind, let me offer some background that could help answer the potentially deeper questions suggested in those questions above. The Origins of Speech-Language Pathology in America The first speech practitioners in America, of course, were not certified clinicians. They couldn't be until they had a profession that could certify them. Rather, they were professionals and educators who took an interest in helping individuals with speech problems. Some were considered "quacks"'mdash;people who falsely claimed they had a secret technique or cure for particular speech disorders. These first clinicians gained expertise in different ways. Those who were seen as legitimate by professionals of their time (e.g., Potter) were from established professions, such as education, medicine, or elocution. For example, Elijah Corlet was a well-respected Boston schoolmaster who advised the young Cotton Mather on how to overcome his stuttering problem. His recommendation was to have Mather speak by elongating his words. Mather described this as doing a kind of "drawling…little short of singing" (see Mather, 1972) and found his improvement sufficient to later publicly preach later that women accused of witchcraft were guilty of conspiring with the devil. While Elijah Corlet's therapy was only advisory, two other well-known and highly respected professionals actually engaged in prolonged speech treatment: Alexander Melville Bell and his son, Alexander Graham Bell. Both were elocutionists, and both developed new ways of understanding, analyzing, and transmitting speech. In 1872, the elder Bell designed a method, called Visible Speech, that provided a visible code indicating the position of the throat, tongue, and lips in the production of various speech sounds. These symbols were used by father and son as a speech treatment technique for teaching speech to those with oral speech difficulties. A second way that American clinicians developed expertise was to serve as apprentices or to study the work of established speech clinicians in Europe. Most of these European clinicians were physicians whose practice consisted of individuals with communication disorders. They came to be known in Europe and America as "speech doctors." Hermann Klenke and Hermann Gutzmann had clinics in Germany, and the clinics of Raphael Coen and Emil Froeschels were located in Austria (see Weiner for a discussion of Gutzmann and Coen's methods in childhood language disorders and Wingate, 1997, for a discussion of Klenke and Gutzmann's stuttering treatments). Finally, a number of early clinicians entered the field after having developed methods for remediating communication difficulties in themselves or in someone they knew well. Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue ran a Stuttering Institute in Indianapolis, and a "Mrs. Leigh" developed her own method of stuttering treatment after serving as governess to a child who stuttered. Other notable clinicians who stuttered were Robert Bates, who invented devices for eliminating stuttering blocks in others, and George Andrew Lewis, who created flamboyant advertising methods to recruit people to his famed stuttering school, The Lewis Institute. Another of these early clinicians was Edgar Werner, who, like the clinicians described above, became interested in the field because of his own stuttering problem. Werner edited and published what may have been the first professional journal in America emphasizing speech disorders, The Voice, which was issued from 1879 to 1892. It focused mostly on stuttering, offering a variety of methods and research findings (see Wingate, 1997, and Merritt, 1954, for a detailed description of the contents of The Voice). Special Interest Groups of "Speech Correctionists" In the early 1900s, there were enough self-proclaimed speech correctionists in the United States to form special interest groups. One group comprised speech correctionists who were originally schoolteachers. Like their fellow teachers, they attended meetings of the National Education Association (NEA) and formed a subgroup that was affiliated with the NEA. The group was led by Walter Babcock Swift, an academic at Western Reserve University in Cleveland. This public school group, which called itself the National Society for the Study and Correction of Speech Disorders, began around 1918 and continued under the leadership of Swift until 1939. A second special interest group'mdash;the one that eventually became the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, after several name changes in between'mdash;was organized by physicians, scholars, and public school administrators who belonged to the National Association of Teachers of Speech. This group formed in 1925, seven years after Swift's group of public school clinicians. It had 25 or so members who had been attending and presenting papers at specialized panels of their parent organization. The group called itself the American Academy of Speech Correction (AASC). It was made up of 15 women and 10 men. Thirteen of the 25 charter members were affiliated with university departments: three in a department of speech communication (Busse, McDowell, Taylor), three in speech correction programs (M. Blanton, S. Blanton, Borden), three in psychology departments (Stinchfield, Travis, West), and three in English departments (Brown, Dorsey, Nichols). There was one graduate student (Brownell). Three of the members were physicians, two with specialties in otolaryngology (Kenyon, West) and one in psychiatry (Blanton). Nine of the founders were affiliated with speech programs in public or private schools, and seven of these nine were agency or state-level administrators of speech correction programs (Camp, Estabrook, Gifford, Green, Lacy, Robbins, Ward). The 25 charter members of AASC were committed to keeping their organization small and selective. They aimed to maintain high educational standards in their newly formed discipline, setting the minimal criteria for membership to those with master's degrees or publications records. This disallowed those whom they considered quacks and most of the public school clinicians from Swift's organization, though they did not know of its existence at the time. The master's degree required by AASC did not have to be in the field of speech correction. Indeed, they could not require a specialty degree in speech-language pathology since there were few graduate programs specializing in speech correction at that time. One leading graduate program in the field was established in 1914 at the University of Wisconsin (UW). UW was well represented at those early AASC meetings, contributing five to the 25-member charter group: Smiley Blanton, Margaret Blanton, and Robert West were on the faculty of UW; Mary Brownell was a graduate student at that time; and Sara Stinchfield Hawk received its first PhD (West earned the second PhD). Developing a Scientific Grounding for Research and Practice AASC's prime purpose was "the promotion of scientific organized work in the field of speech correction" (Malone, 1999). The felt need for developing a scientific basis for this new profession is indicated by the following recollection of Charles Van Riper, who was just entering the field at about the time AASC was being formed: "Back then we had no texts, no tools," he remembered. "We recorded our clients' speech on wax phonograph cylinders. Our sound waves were scratched on a smoked kymograph drum. Using tuning forks of different frequencies, we calibrated hearing loss by marks on the office carpet. We had no standardized tests" (see Van Riper, 1989, pp. 72'ndash;73). So the pioneers, several of whom were in the founding group of ASHA, set out to design diagnostic tools, concepts, and normative data for creating a more scientific base for research and practice in the field. Their efforts included creating and forwarding diagnostic taxonomies of the causes and conditions associated with different communication disorders, developing diagnostic tests to measure client performance in a variety of areas, and collecting normative data to be used as standards for differentiating abnormal from normal communication performance. Creating an Enlightening History A surface history, containing some significant landmarks and players, can offer hints for where to go when creating a more in-depth history. Finding out who our predecessors were and what they did can lead to an understanding of the socio-cultural circumstances surrounding their practices and decisions. It can also allow us to wonder where we would be if our forebears had taken other paths and made other decisions. For instance, what would have happened had Swift's group been able to sustain itself? Or what might we have learned from the methods forwarded by those first clinicians who were dubbed "quacks" (see Marcel Wingate's recent book on the history of stuttering practices [Wingate, 1997] for details on their approaches and their currency for today's practices). Or what would have happened to approaches that were considered respectable in our historical past had they been submitted to today's evidence-based criteria? What should we make of that? One common justification for knowing one's history is that it will help avoid repeating past mistakes. What I would hope is that we begin the pursuit of our history for other reasons. Rather than looking back to find out what we did wrong, I would rather we ask why it was not considered wrong then and how we are so sure that we are doing the right things now. Why was it acceptable in the past for even the most respectable of clinicians to claim to be able to cure a disorder? What has led us to the modern-day use of evidence-based practices to determine the worth of services rendered? What were the differences in socio-cultural-historical contexts that led to these dramatic changes in how clinicians anticipate outcomes? I would argue that knowing our own history, beyond names and dates, would allow us to reflect in a deeper way about the quality and rationales of modern-day services. I therefore recommend that we prepare ourselves for celebrating ASHA's 100th anniversary by discovering how and why our ancestors did what they did. In that way, we will be better able to understand the whys and wherefores of today's practices. Charter Members of ASHA, 1926 (Adapted from Paden, 1970, pp. 12–13; and Malone, 1999, p. 9) Margaret Gray Blanton, lecturer at Tulane University and the University of Wisconsin in the field of speech correction. Her master's thesis was on the subject of infant development (1917), and she also wrote books on stuttering (1925) and on speech training for children (1919, with Smiley Blanton). Smiley Blanton, psychiatrist and the director of the University of Wisconsin Speech and Mental Hygiene Clinic and a child guidance clinic in Minneapolis, MN. He authored a number of publications on various aspects of speech correction, including stuttering and voice and speech problems of preschool children. Richard C. Borden, director of the Speech Clinic at New York University. Frederick W. Brown, professor in the department of spoken English at Smith College. Mary A. Brownell, graduate student at the University of Wisconsin. Robert West was her advisor. Alvin Busse, professor of speech at New York University. Pauline Camp, director of the Wisconsin State Program in Speech Correction. Jane Dorsey, professor in the department of spoken English at Smith College. Eudora P. Estabrook, director of the speech correction department in the Grand Rapids, MI, public schools. Sina V. Fladeland Waterhouse, speech correctionist at Perkins Institute for the Blind in Watertown, MA. Mabel F. Gifford, speech clinician in the department of pediatrics at the California Medical School Speech Clinic and director of the California State Public School Program. Max Goldstein, otolaryngologist who studied the auditory training methods of the deaf with Victor Urbantschisch in Vienna, Austria. He founded the Central Institute for the Deaf in St Louis, MO, in 1914. Ruth Green, program director of the Minneapolis Public Schools Speech Program. Laura Heilman, public school speech correctionist in California. Elmer L. Kenyon, otolaryngologist who studied with H. Gutzmann in Germany. He established a speech and hearing clinic at Rush Medical College in Chicago in 1910. Mabel V. Lacy, principal of the School for the Deaf in Hawaii. Elizabeth McDowell, professor of speech at Columbia University. Thyrza Nichols, teacher of English at the Baldwin School, a K–12 private school for girls in Bryn Mawr, PA. Samuel D. Robbins, director of the Boston Stammerers Institute. He was also a researcher affiliated with Harvard University. Sara M. Stinchfield, first PhD to graduate with a major in speech pathology. She was an associate professor at Mount Holyoke College and was director of its speech clinic. Jane Bliss Taylor, professor of speech at Hunter College. Charles K. Thomas, PhD in phonetics with a specialty in American dialects. He taught at Cornell University. Lee Edward Travis, faculty member at the University of Iowa. He established a major there in speech correction. Lavilla Ward, followed Pauline Camp as the director of Wisconsin's Public Schools Program. Robert West, PhD in speech pathology from the University of Wisconsin, under the direction of Smiley Blanton. In 1925, West was the director of the speech pathology program at the University of Wisconsin. Select Authors and Books Published in America in the Earliest Days of Speech-Language Pathology (Speech Correction) (1850–1920) Author Book and Date of Publication Contents J. Aitken Meigs Clinical report on Robert Bates' Cure for Stammering (1852) This physician, interested in speech disorders, reports positively on results of inventions of appliances by Robert Bates as a treatment of stuttering. The appliances included a spoon-shaped mouth instrument for bilabial stuttering, a tube and rubber band placed on the teeth for dental stuttering, and a laryngeal compressor (a screw and buckle placed over the larynx) for laryngeal spasms. Alexander Melville Bell The Faults of Speech (1880); Observations on Defects of Speech (1883) An elocutionist from Scotland, A.M. Bell analyzed speech sounds and offered practical guidance and exercises for conducting speech therapy (use of visible speech charts indicating location of articulators for different sounds). He published several books in America. His son, Alexander Graham Bell, used visible speech methods in his elocutionist practice in Boston, MA, with an emphasis on work of oral speech of the deaf. Samuel O. Potter Speech and its Defects (1882) Potter, a physician and someone who stuttered, published his medical thesis. It contained an appeal to physicians to be more involved in the treatment of speech disorders. Includes description of articulatory anatomy and taxonomy of speech defects. The primary emphasis was on treatments of stuttering (he called it dyslalia). George Andrew Lewis Home Cure for Stammerers (1907) Lewis ran a popular school for stuttering therapy in Detroit, MI. His cure involved swinging one arm in a figure eight and enunciating syllables at the same time. Edward Wheeler Scripture Stuttering and Lisping (1912) Scripture was a speech scientist trained by Wundt in Germany and a proponent of psychoanalytic approaches to treating speech disorders. In this book, he combines psychoanalytic methods with recommended physicalexercises (breathing, tongue gymnastics) for changing speech patterning. Charles Sidney Bluemel Mental Aspects of Stuttering (1913); Stammering and Cognate Defects of Speech (1913) Bluemel was a psychiatrist who stuttered. He saw stuttering as being related to defective auditory or visual imagery and designed treatment to enhance visual imagery to minimize chaotic speech impulses. Margaret and Smiley Blanton Speech Training for Children: The Hygiene of Speech (1919) Margaret Blanton was a speech correctionist, and Smiley Blanton was a psychiatrist and director of the Speech Clinic at the University of Wisconsin. They geared this book to parents and teachers of children in elementary school. The book emphasizes the emotional side of speech. It provides information about development in general and gives hints about child rearing. The final section contains speech classroom exercises. Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue Stammering: Its Cause and Cure (1919) Bogue himself stuttered. He established a well-known stuttering clinic in Indianapolis. This book describes his own difficulties and those of his patients as well as offering a treatment cure. Sara Stinchfield Hawk A Preliminary Study in Corrective Speech (1920) This is a published master's thesis containing a classification of "defective speech conditions and causes of speech disorders" in elementary school children. The monograph also contains materials for articulation testing and sample drill charts. References on the History of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology in America Aram D., & Nation J. (1982). Historical heritage of child language disorders.In Aram D. & Nation J. (Eds.), Child language disorders (pp. 7–31). St. Louis: The C.V. Mosby Company. Google Scholar Ball T.S. (1971). Itard, Seguin, and Kephart: Sensory education—a learning interpretation. Columbus, OH: Charles Merrill. Google Scholar Bangs J.L. (1949 or 1948?). A comprehensive historical survey of c