After I had tried the electric treatment and found it wanting, I heard of a clairvoyant who could, by looking at a person, tell his name, age, occupation, place of residence, etc., and could cure all diseases and afflictions including stammering.  So I thought I would give him a trial.  He claimed to work through a “greater power”—­whatever that was—­and so I paid him his fee to see the “greater power” work—­and to be cured of stammering, as per promise.  But there was nothing doing in the line of a cure—­all I got in trying to be cured, was another chapter added to my book of experience.

Following this experience, I tried an osteopath, whose methods, however good they might have been, affected merely the physical organs and could not hope to reach the real cause of my trouble.  I do not doubt that this man was entirely sincere in explaining his own science to me in a way that led me to build up hopes of relief from that method.  He simply did not understand stammering and its causes and was therefore not prepared to treat it.

I was told of another doctor who claimed to be able to cure stammering.  When I called to see him, he had me wait in his reception room for nearly two hours, for the purpose, I presume, of giving me the impression that he was a very busy man.  Then he called me into his private consultation room, where he apparently had all of the modern and up-to-date surgical instruments.  He put me through a thorough examination, after which he said that the only thing to cure me was a surgical operation to have my tonsils removed.  I was not willing to consent to the use of the knife, so therefore the operation was never performed.

Since that time, however, the practice of operating on children especially for the removal of adenoids and tonsils has become very popular and quite frequently this is the remedy prescribed for various and sundry ailments of childhood.  In no case must a parent expect to eradicate stuttering or stammering by the removal of the tonsils.  The operation, beneficial as it may be in other ways, does not prevent the child from stammering—­for the operation does not remove the cause of the stammering—­that cause is mental, not physical.

CHAPTER VII

THE BENEFIT OF MANY FAILURES

I had now tried upwards of fifteen different methods for the cure of my stammering.  I had tried the physician; the surgeon; the elocution teacher; the hypnotic specialist; the osteopath; a clairvoyant; a mail-order scheme; the world’s greatest speech specialist—­so-called, and several other things.  My parents had spent hundreds of dollars of money trying to have me cured.  They had spared no effort, stopped at no cost.  And yet I now stammered worse than I had ever stammered before.  Everything I had tried had been a worthless failure.  Nothing had been of the least permanent good to me.  My money was gone, months of time had been wasted and I now began to wonder if I had not been very foolish indeed, in going to first one man and then another, trying to be cured.  “Wouldn’t it have been better,” I asked, “if I had resigned myself to a life as a stammerer and let it go at that?”