stuttering, stammering, thickness or indistinctness of the voice, loss of voice, or difficulty in enunciation. Most of these difficulties depend upon remediable causes. But it is singular how completely this branch is neglected by most physicians.
When, for instance, we commence to devote our attention to the methods recommended to cure stammering, we do not find a single author in the English language who treats it from a scientific point of view. It has been left in the hands of elocutionists and charlatans, who are given to lauding some individual method of their own as successful in every case.
Such claims bear upon their face their own refutation. It is as if a man pretended to cure blindness by some one remedy. Blindness arises from a host of diverse conditions of the organ. So does stammering.
It may be the innervation which is at fault, and then electricity promises much. It is sometimes an inborn muscular debility, and then we can employ the instruments devised by Dr. Itard and others, with fair prospects. Occasionally it is owing to a contraction of certain muscles, and these were the cases which the famous surgeon Dieffenbach cured by cutting those muscles. Not unfrequently it is of the nature of chorea, when we must treat it with internal remedies as we do that disease. Frequently, certain letters and sounds only are stammered, and then a series of lingual gymnastics will be followed by prompt amend-
