Monster Study

Uncommon card · No. 181137

The Monster Study was a non-consensual experiment performed on 22 orphan children between ages 5 to 15 at the Soldiers and Sailors Orphans Home in Davenport, Iowa in 1939 about stuttering. It was conducted by Wendell Johnson through the University of Iowa with the physical experiment being performed by his graduate student Mary Tudor. Wendell Johnson, a former student at the University of Iowa, dedicated his life’s work to identifying the causes of stuttering and discovering a cure. Johnson, who had a severe stutter himself, wanted to understand where it originated and how it could be stopped, largely because he had been teased throughout his life. When he began studying speech pathology, he tested his own speech patterns, and the leading theory at the time that speech disorder is learned behaviour and not biological. Johnson, who understood the impact that early stuttering could have on a child’s mental state, once stated, “The stuttering child is a crippled child.” The study was never...

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