Monster Study, 1939: Twenty-Two Orphans Used to Test a Theory of Stuttering

In January 1939, children at the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home in Davenport were called to meet a university student named Mary Tudor. They were told they were taking part in speech treatment. No one told them they were research subjects. No parent was present to give permission or ask what the sessions were for.

The programme was designed by Wendell Johnson, a speech specialist at the State University of Iowa, now the University of Iowa. Johnson had stuttered as a child. He believed that stuttering did not always begin in the body. In his view, a child who spoke normally could be labelled a “stutterer,” corrected at every sentence, frightened about speaking, and eventually pushed into a speech problem. To test that idea, the researchers selected twenty-two children in a place where the children could not bring a family advocate into the room.