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 cured me. Then I decided to try the Unit Method. Nine years ago I did so—a decision that I have never regretted. It was 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.
CHAPTER II
CASES THAT "CURE THEMSELVES"
Not infrequently from some source will be heard a story, many times retold, to the effect that "So-and-so" who stammered for many years has been cured—that the trouble has magically disappeared and that he stammers no longer.