Lawsuit Filed Over 1939 Stuttering Study

As seen in this newsday report

For six months, Mary Nixon and 10 other orphans were relentlessly belittled for every little imperfection in their speech to test the theory that children become stutterers because of psychological pressure.

Sixty-four years later, the experience still stings.

Nixon, now 76, and some of the other test subjects sued the University of Iowa earlier this year over lifelong psychological problems they say stem in part from the 1939 experiment.

There is an extensive report on the horrors of this insanity. Note that all the children in the study were normal when the study began, and the study attempted to induce the children into becoming stutterers. Techniques included belittling the chilkdren and destroying their self esteem.