Bloody M-M-Mary

It's all about the science

Looking for a tale that will tear your heart out, featuring betrayal of trust, abuse of authority, world class hubris, and innocent lives destroyed? Forget the fiction shelves, and turn instead to the story of some kids from the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home in Davenport, as reported by Jim Dyer in the San Jose Mercury News.

In the late 1930's, University of Iowa professor Wendell Johnson theorized that stuttering was not an inborn condition, but something children learned from overzealous parents who seized on minor speech imperfections. In time, children would become acutely aware of their speech and could not help but stutter.

To prove his contention, Johnson designed an experiment as elegant in its simplicity, as it was evil in its intent: Find some expendable kids, divide them up into experimental and control groups, and browbeat the experimental group into stuttering.

Of course, a professor can't be expected to actually do the work. Thus, he enlisted an eager graduate student, with the unlikely name of Mary Tudor, to visit the orphanage, tell those in charge that she was performing speech therapy, gain the confidence of 22 kids, and proceed to ruin half of them.

Results from the experiment, conducted between January and May 1939, seemed to bear out his theory.

Eight of the orphans that Tudor badgered about their speech--even if it was nearly flawless at first--became chronic stutterers by Spring. And most of them remained chronic stutterers for the rest of their lives.

"It's affected me right now," says Mary Korlaske Nixon, once a fourth-grader who desperately wanted to please Tudor. "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."

"There but for the grace of God, I could have been placed in an experimental group," said Donna Lee Hughes Collings, who had been a normal speaker in a control group and therefore suffered no damage. "It could have been my life that was destroyed."

Tudor now expresses a deep ambivalence, if not outright regret, over the experiment. "It was a small price to pay for science," she would say many times. Indeed. It was quite a small price--for her.

"I didn't like what I was doing to those children," Tudor told the Mercury News. "It was a hard, terrible thing. Today, I probably would have challenged it. Back then you did what you were told. It was an assignment. And I did it." One wonders what else she would have done to the kids, if ordered by Johnson.

You might ask why our intrepid researchers did not abandon the protocol once the potential results were clear enough, and then start immediate corrective therapy? The answer is easy enough. Wendell, the mad scientist, had proved his theory, and that is all that mattered. The stuttering children were collateral damage. Sound familiar?

As for dear Dr. Johnson, he died a revered man in 1965 at age 59. In 1968, the University of Iowa founded the Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Center, which remains one of the nation's leading institutes for speech pathology and audiology.

According to Tudor, he became aloof a few years later, perhaps wishing to distance himself from her, being a vivid reminder of his sick experiment. He surely was ashamed of it, since it was never published. After all, purposely screwing up other human beings is far too reminiscent of Dr. Josef Mengele, whose antics were being exposed at about the time that Johnson could have published. If the comparison made him uneasy, that's fine by me.

After submitting her thesis on the experiment, Tudor moved to Wisconsin, though she did return to the orphanage three times to try to reverse the damage she had done. Johnson apparently did nothing else to try to help the kids.

"I don't know why Wendell Johnson didn't send a therapist from the university over to the orphanage," she said. "They needed therapy to lose that fear, or the psychological effects could be long-lasting. Wendell Johnson would know that you couldn't reverse it in three sessions of positive therapy."

Still, Johnson has his defenders.

"It was a different time and the values were different," said Duane Spriestersbach, a close colleague of Johnson's who went on to become a professor of speech pathology at the University of Iowa.

"Today we might disagree with what he did, but in those days it was fully within the norms of the time."

"I heard some of the orphans didn't recover," said another of Johnson's proteges, Bill Trotter, now a retired Marquette University professor. "But I know Wendell Johnson was an extremely ethical and moral person, and if something happened to those children it was because of something he did not foresee."

Talk about cognitive dissonance! It has NEVER been within the norms of ANY time to deliberately do irreversible damage to healthy individuals in the course of medical experiments. The Hippocratic Oath, dating from perhaps 400 B.C., states, in part, "I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous."

Jesus once asked "What father among you would hand his son a snake when he asks for a fish? Or hand him a scorpion when he asks for an egg?" (Luke 11:11-12) It seemed like pretty safe hyperbole. But then, He hadn't yet heard about Mary Tudor and Wendell Johnson.