Notes For a History of Speech Pathology*

The purpose of this essentially historical and informal study is to draw attention to some generally overlooked facts and to trace some lines of deveolpment in the psychoanalytic view of stuttering so that the past will reveal itself more clearly. Without aspiring to write a comprehensive examination, I will paint a broader picture of the background of our present views of stuttering, proceeding by a series of vignettes to highlight certain aspects of psychoanalytic work, its influence, and reactions to it.

James Jackson Putnam was the first professor of neurology at Harvard University.112a After graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1869, he studied with some of the best-known names in European neurology—John Hughlings Jackson,59a later known as the father of modern neurology, and Theodor Meynert. Shortly after his return to the United States he joined the faculty of Harvard, and in 1893 he was appointed to the first full professorship in neurology at the Medical School. His career, a conventional part of the times. reflected the current revolution in biology and accompanying growth in medicine. Finding the prevalent materialist interpretations unsatisfactory, he became interested in functional neuorlogical problems. Not only did he take a functional view of neurology but, like other neurologists of his day—Charcot, Janet, Freud, Bleuler, Adolf Meyer, and Morton Prince— he became interested in psychotherapy. His first response was conventional: he found psychotherapy, unscientific and denounced it.59b