Shut your mouth and save your life / by George Catlin.

  • George Catlin
Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Shut your mouth and save your life / by George Catlin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    105/114 page 97
    suddenly called up from its habitual hanging position, to perform its part in articulation. This singular and most unfortunate impediment in speech has been attributed to many causes, and some writers pretend to have traced it to physiological defects, making Nature to blame for it: but, like most of the diseases and deformities of mankind, it is undoubtedly the result of habit, and what habit so likely to produce it as the one condemned in this little book, of allowing the under jaw to fall, and to be carried in a hanging position, to be raised by a jerk (instead of being lower- ed) in the effort to speak. In most cases of the fallen jaw, stuttering and other impediments and inelegancies in speech are the consequences; though, in some few cases, by a rigid practice, those defects have in a measure been overcome. With the handsome young man now under view, of 20 years, turn back to the illustration on page 47, and see the aspect he presents at the age of 50 (if he is for- tunate enough to live so long). Stuttering need not be heard to be detected in this case, for it is readable in the lines and expressions of the face. I have lived a long life and communed freely with the world, on various parts of the globe, and I never met (to my recollection) a stuttering old man, and rarely (if ever) an aged man or woman with an open mouth and a hanging jaw. Why this, when the ranks of
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