NY Times Archives Public Domain

Do the names Sarah Barrows, Margaret Blanton, Pauline Camp, Jane Leigh, or Edna Hill Young ring a bell? Judith Duchan, emeritus professor from the Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences at the University of Buffalo hopes so. She has a website on the history of speech pathology, part of which summarizes a presentation she gave at the 2005 ASHA convention. She proposes "Founding Foremother Awards" to honor "The clinical contribution criteria have excluded people who have worked in the trenches-the early public school clinicians, for example who were devising materials and methods on their own and promoting the "new" profession to others." I think we could agree that her idea is intriguing and long overdue. For more information go to: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~duchan/new_history/women_profession.html

On her site, Judith also summarizes the origins and evolution of the field of speech pathology as influenced by shifts in scientific thinking and professionalization of the field by describing the influences that the elocution movement, the scientific revolution, and the rise of professionalism had on the practices carried out by speech correctionists in the United States
For the general history and chronology menu go to: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~duchan/new_history/overview.html

Another Judy, Judith Kuster, who provides comphrensive references on her own website (http://www.mnsu.edu/comdis/kuster2/welcome.html) gives high marks to Duchan's site noting, I asked twelve graduate students in our department which of the above names they had ever heard of. Van Riper -- [Twelve]. Johnson -- nine. Templin -- five. Darley -- three. Schuell -- one. The rest of the names -- none. Checking several introductory texts, I found nothing about the history of speech-language pathology. Although there may be other universities doing it, the only course I could find devoted to the history of speech-language pathology was an elective at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She suggests that Duchan's site could be adopted as the "chapter" on the history of our field for an introductory course or for a graduate research class. See her comments on http://www.mnsu.edu/comdis/kuster4/part46.html

You can also see one of Judith Duchan's articles on ASHA's website: http://www.asha.org/about/publications/leader-online/archives/2002/q4/02...