Speakers, singers and stammerers / by Frederick Helmore.

  • Helmore, Frederick.
Date:
1874
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Speakers, singers and stammerers / by Frederick Helmore. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    88/146 page 62
    first in private, next before sensible intimate friends, and at length you will be able to do so in school, college or in public company. When first practising reading, hold the book above your head, so as to compel you to throw the head back, and to elongate the neck. Many stammerers will read in this position without any hesitation. Keep your mouth shut when not speaking. Respiration should be carried on as much as possible through the nostrils. Above all, never catch in the breath through the month, when speaking, reading, or singing ; but always through the nostrils. The same rule applies to walking and all athletic exercises. No further advice can be better than that contained in the following extract from Frazer's Magazine of July, 1859. Stammerers need above all men to keep up that mentein sanam in corpore sano, which is now-a-days called, somewhat offensively, muscular Christianity—a term worthy of a puling and enervated generation of thinkers, who prove their own unhealthiness by their contemptuous surprise at any praise of that health which ought to be the normal condition of the whole human race. But whosoever can afford an enervated body, and an abject character, the stammerer cannot. With him it is a question of life and death. He must make a man of himself or be liable to his tormentor to the last. Let him, therefore, eschew all base perturbations of mind; all cowardice, servility, meanness, vanity, and hankering after admiration ; for these all will make many a mgin, by a just judgment, stammer on the spot. Let him, for the same reason, eschew all anger, peevishness, haste, even pardonable eagerness. In a word, let him eschew the root of all evil, selfishness and self-seeking; for he will surely find that when- soever he begins thinking about himself, then is the dumb devil of stammering close at his elbow. Let him eschew too all superstition, whether of that abject kind which fancies
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