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KNOTTED TONGUES
by Benson Bobrick Simon & Schuster, 1995 240 pages, $22.00
TRY SAYING "DEMOSTHENES STUTtered" five times quickly. The trouble you may have is nothing compared with what some 55 million people around the world must face every day. A profound stutterer can trip over the simplest phrase, even a familiar name, as initial hesitation escalates into episodes of frenzied gasping, foot stamping, bodily contortions or foaming at the mouth. "Even in less violent cases," the distinguished nineteenth-century surgeon Edward Warren wrote, "the whole nervous system is in violent agitation, every nerve in his body, to the ends of his fingers and his toes, seems to him to vibrate, like the strings of a harp.
As Demosthenes stuttered, so did Charles Darwin, Lewis Carroll, Henry James and W. Somerset Maugham. But why? The stutterer Moses Mendelssohn, an eighteenth-century German intellectual...