|
Extensive List of References on the History of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology in America
Charter Members of ASHA
Select Authors and Books Published in America in the Earliest Days of Speech-Language Pathology (1850'ndash;1920)
Look for a feature article on the history of audiology in a 2003 issue of The ASHA Leader .
by Judith Felson Duchan
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 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.
........
Judy Duchan is professor emerita from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She has published widely in language pathology, with particular emphases in the areas of autism, pragmatics, childhood language, and aphasia. Among other projects, she is currently developing a Web site on aspects of the history of clinical practices in speech-language pathology in America ( www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~duchan/history.html ).
|