The King's Speech - Mark Logue [46]
I once had two brothers as patients. One spoke easily when with his family but could not speak to strangers. The other was fluent with strangers but the reverse with friends or relations. Both were cured but by different methods, although the defects treated were almost identical. Men have almost the monopoly of speech defects. The proportions are one woman to a hundred men.
When a woman has a defect it is usually a bad one, but, she nearly always has success if she decides to overcome it. I think this is due to her power of concentration, which, I always hold, is greater than that of a man.
Stammering is one of the commonest speech defects, and one which can nearly always be cured. In fact, except in rare cases of physical malformation, most speech defects can be overcome provided the will is present in the patient. Without that will to get better, treatment is hopeless. I have had patients to whom I have had to say: ‘I can do nothing for you,’ [but] given the co-operation of the patient, even extreme cases of aphonia (complete loss of voice) are treatable.
As part of his goal of bringing greater respectability to his profession, Logue also succeeded in setting up the British Society of Speech Therapists in 1935. The Duke was among those whom he told. Logue sent him a copy of the Society’s inaugural newsletter. The Duke wrote back, suitably enthusiastic, on 24 July 1935. ‘I am so glad to hear you have been able to get your dream in material form at last and do hope it will be a success,’ he wrote.
The Society’s stated aim was ‘to establish the profession of speech therapy on a satisfactory basis in this country and overseas, and to up and maintain suitable standards of professional conduct, consistent with a close relationship with the medical profession’. Many of its members, like Logue, were teachers with experience as private practitioners; some were on the staff of hospitals. Later, the Society was to set up a National Hospital School of Speech Therapy where, after a two-year course in which they studied a range of subjects including phonetics, anatomy, paediatrics, orthodontics and diseases of the ear, nose and throat, students qualified as Medical Auxiliaries (Speech Therapists).
Inevitably, given the sheer number of people with stammers (and the desperation of many to find a cure), the area was an attractive one to quacks keen to cash in. The Society’s executive council was especially alarmed in the summer of 1936 by the activities of a certain Ramon H. Wings, a self-styled ‘specialist in the German method of the treatment of stammering and stuttering’, who placed huge advertisements in Tube stations, on hoardings and in the public press, promising free lectures and advice. Wings’s lectures drew audiences of up to a thousand people in search of a quick guaranteed cure for their trouble.
Once the patients had been lured in, they would be given a free personal consultation, at which they would be offered a course of ten lessons for a fee of ten guineas. They would then be divided into groups of twenty to a hundred people, and after a few sessions the best of them would themselves become teachers, and in some cases actually stage big public meetings of their own, producing a kind of snowball effect. After the ten lessons, Wings himself would move on to another city and start the whole process again. All in all, the whole thing was a rather lucrative venture.
The members of the executive were angered by Wings’s promises of a quick cure, which they felt aroused unrealistic hopes in patients. Admittedly, such group sessions with a charismatic leader could, through a process of mass suggestion, lead to a marked improvement in ‘certain neurotic cases’ – during which the glowing testimonials for future advertisements were secured. But such improvements were only temporary. Conditions such as stammering, stuttering, lisping, cleft palate and retarded speech could only be treated over time and on a one-to-one basis. Their concern was clearly not just about their patients; they