CHAPTER IV

Can stammering be cured by mail?

In the years past there have been attempts from time to time to induce the stammerer to seek a cure for his impediment in mail order treatments.  As has already been told, I was the victim of one of these so-called “correspondence-cures” and know something about them from personal experience.

In the first place, the sufferer usually takes up with the mail order specialist because this man retails his “profound” knowledge at a low rate, a rate so low that even a single thought on the subject would convince anyone that his money was buying a few sheets of paper but no professional knowledge or experience.

The very best correspondence course I have ever known anything about was not as good as a number of books on elocution that are available in any good library.  Usually these courses are written by some charlatan who is in business as a mail-order-man selling trinkets and stammering cures or running a general correspondence school, teaching not only how to cure stammering by correspondence but giving courses in “Hair-Waving” and “How to Become a Detective.”  It is needless for me to say that such as these are in the business, not for the good of the stammerer nor even for the purpose of helping him, but simply for the money that can be extracted from the stammerer or stutterer.

The difference:  There are two main differences, however, between the books which the stammerer may read without cost and the correspondence course for which he pays out his good money—­many dollars of it.  The correspondence course has been written by a man who knew little or nothing of the subject, and who put out a course for stammerers only because he knew something of the number of stammerers in his territory and said to himself, “My, but I ought to be able to sell them a mail-order cure.”  Forthwith he sits down and writes a course—­it isn’t necessary to have anything in it at all.  Often these men do not even take the trouble to consult reliable books on the subject.  They do not profess to know anything about stammering or stuttering, their cause or their cure.  They simply sit down and write—­and when they have it written, they send it to the printer, have it printed and then split these printed sheets up into ten, or twenty, or fifty, or a hundred lessons—­whatever their fancy may dictate, and begin to sell them.  They have no thought of the results—­results to them mean nothing save the number of courses that can be sold—­and whether or not a single iota of good accrues to the stammerer from this expenditure of money is one of the things in which the correspondence school stammering specialist is not at all interested.

The most that can be expected from the very best mail course for the cure of stammering is that the subscriber will receive information worth as much as that which might be in a library book.  He receives this in installments and for privilege of reading it piece-meal, pays from $50 to $100.