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Nature and nurture in stuttering: a systematic review on the case of Moses

  • History of Neurology
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Abstract

Stuttering is a disturbance of normal fluency of speech whose pathophysiology is still not well understood. We investigated one of the most ancient speech disorders in the biblical person Moses who lived in approximately 1300 BC. To get the most complete medical and non-medical information on Moses, we did systematic searches in the Holy Bible using the Bible-Discovery v2.3© software (http://www.bible-discovery.com) looking for verses containing the terms “Moses”, “Stuttering” and “Stutter”; and in PubMed/Medline database for manuscripts having the terms “Moses”, “Bible” and “Stuttering”. From the Bible search, 742 verses were found, of which 23 were relevant; three additional verses were found by hand search. Six papers discussing Moses’s pathology were found in the PubMed search. The analysis of ancient descriptions in the light of current research suggests that stuttering is the most likely pathology Moses had, with clear evidence for both genetic origin and environmental triggers. Further, it was found that Moses practiced some “sensory tricks” that could be used to relieve his speech disorder which are, to our knowledge, the first “tricks” that successfully modulated a movement disorder described in the medical literature.

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Acknowledgments

The authors offer their special thanks to Dr. Carlos V. Rizzo, PhD, and Edgardo Bayona, MD (s) for their helpful comments and to Doctor Richard L. Doty for kind support. Doctor FE Leon-Sarmiento was supported by grants from the NIH (R01 DA019055-04) and from the US Department of Defense (USAMRAA W81XWH-09-1-0467).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Smell and Taste Center, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

    Fidias E. Leon-Sarmiento

  2. Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Fidias E. Leon-Sarmiento

  3. Faculty of Medicine, Universidad Nacional, Bogota, Colombia

    Edwin Paez

  4. Human Motor Control Section, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, MD, USA

    Mark Hallett

  5. Unit of Parkinson and Movement Disorders, Mediciencias Research Group, Universidad Nacional, Bogota, Colombia

    Fidias E. Leon-Sarmiento

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  1. Fidias E. Leon-Sarmiento
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  2. Edwin Paez
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  3. Mark Hallett
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Correspondence to Fidias E. Leon-Sarmiento.

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Leon-Sarmiento, F.E., Paez, E. & Hallett, M. Nature and nurture in stuttering: a systematic review on the case of Moses. Neurol Sci 34, 231–237 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10072-012-0984-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10072-012-0984-2

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