Study forced orphans to stutter
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MORAGA, Calif. - For four months during the Great Depression, Mary Tudor taught a group of children at an Iowa orphanage a lesson they would never forget: She taught them to stutter.
The experiment eventually led to a theory that helped thousands of children overcome the speech impediment. But it also condemned some of the children in Tudor's class to lives as misfits.
A lifetime later, the private story of 22 orphans who unwittingly submitted to the experiment has become public through an investigation by the San Jose Mercury News, which reported on its findings yesterday and today.
Tudor, then an eager graduate student at the University of Iowa, is now Mary Tudor Jacobs, 84, a retired speech therapist who lives in the San Francisco suburb of Moraga. Her subjects, at least 13 of whom are still alive, learned of the experiment only this spring when the newspaper contacted them.
Decades ago, the orphans saw Jacobs as a benefactor, whose visits provided a break from the privation of the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home in Davenport.
Now, some call her "monster."
"It's affected me right now," says Mary Korlaske, now 74. "I don't like to read out loud because I'm afraid of making a mistake. I don't like talking to people because of saying the wrong word."
The experiment was designed by Jabobs' professor, Dr. Wendell Johnson, who went on to become a prominent speech pathologist.
Johnson theorized that stuttering was not an inborn condition but something children learned from parents who seized on minor speech imperfections.
Results from the experiment Jacobs conducted for Johnson from January into May 1939 seemed to prove his theory. The protocol was simple: The children were divided into two groups of 11, with one group labeled normal speakers and given positive speech therapy, and the other group induced to stutter.
Eight of the orphans Jacobs badgered about their speech - even if it was nearly flawless at first - became chronic stutterers.
Johnson, himself a stutterer, never disclosed the orphan experiments although he used evidence from them to reach his conclusions. As the world learned of Nazi experiments on living subjects, Johnson's peers warned him the research could destroy his career.
Still, until the 1970s Johnson's work was speech-therapy orthodoxy and even today the orphan experiment underlies the popular view that positive reinforcement is the best therapy for children with speech problems.
Jacobs doesn't know how Johnson regarded the orphans' treatment, but she has strong feelings.
"I didn't like what I was doing to those children," she said. "It was a hard, terrible thing. Today, I probably would have challenged it. Back then you did what you were told."
Jacobs returned to the orphanage three times to try to reverse the stuttering during the 1940s. Johnson apparently did nothing else to try to reverse the damage.
Three months ago, Jacobs received a letter from Korlaske, now Mary Korlaske Nixon. The letter, full of misspelled words seemingly scratched in fits and bursts, called her "monster" and "Nazi."
"I remember your face, how kind you were and you looked like my mother," she wrote. "But you were ther to destroy my life."
Nixon eventually married a man who helped her piece together her self-confidence, but she resumed stuttering after he died in 1999. She moved into the Iowa Veterans' Home and placed a "Do Not Disturb" sign on her door, venturing out only on rare occasions.
Jacobs remains deeply ambivalent about the experiment.
"Look at the countless number of children it helped," she said.
And yet, she can't forget how the orphans greeted her, running to her car and helping her carry materials for the experiment: "That was the pitiful part. That I got them to trust me and then I did this horrible thing to them."