Latest / Learn Literacy Podcast / 22. History of Dyslexia Part 11: Orton Part 1
Transcript
- Cheryl Urbanczyk: Hello everyone and welcome to this episode of the Learn Literacy Podcast, where we focus on language for life by teaching literacy through language and structure. Today is another episode in our History of Dyslexia series. We had spent a lot of time going way back to the beginning and talking about where the term dyslexia came from, what congenital word blindness is, looking at Dr. James Hinschelwood 1917 book, spending many episodes there. we're turning our attention some years forward away from the European context to the American context to Dr. Samuel Orton. So we will spend a series of episodes talking about him. Dr. Samuel Orton is the Orton, that's the Orton Gillingham approach, that the approach is named after. So today we'll start with some biographical facts and some information. And other episodes will deal with some other aspects of his history and writings and what we learn from his work. starting off, I have a very quick biographical note from the archives of the Columbia University Health Sciences Library. Samuel Torrey Orton lived from 1879 to 1948. Samuel Tori Orton was born in Columbus, Ohio on October 15, 1879. His father, Edward Orton, was at various times the state geologist of Ohio, the president of Antioch College, and the first president of Ohio State University. Other distinguished family members included his cousin, President William Taft, that's distinguished for sure, and his uncle, educator Horace Taft of the Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, where young Sam completed high school in 1897. Orton attended Ohio State University, the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and Harvard University, where he completed study there in 1906. He was a member of Alpha Omega Alpha and Sigma Xi, and he began his medical career by training in pathology. Under Frank B. Mallory at Boston City Hospital in 1905-1906. He then spent a year at the Columbus, Ohio State Hospital and two years at St. Ann's Hospital in Anaconda, Montana. So the biographical sketch from Columbia University has a bunch of details, and I'll bring some things in and out from there. But now I want to turn to an article Called The Orton Story, which was written by June Orton, who is Dr. Orton's second wife. So this was an article published in the Bulletin of the Orton Society in 1957, and she talks about his story and his work. So let's review this together. the Orton Story by June L. Orton. Three decades have now passed since Samuel T. Orton began his work with children with specific language disabilities. It was in 1925 that he first called the attention of his medical colleagues in neurology and psychiatry to the fact that many otherwise normal children have a specific difficulty in learning to read. From that time until his death in 1948, Dr. Orton devoted himself to research and teaching in this field. Training other workers and helping many individual children to overcome their language handicaps. In the succeeding years, his ideas have been developed in other medical centers and put into practice by many teachers and educators throughout the country. Their interpretation of his theories and their application of his methods have been presented in the various issues of the Bulletin, meaning the Bulletin of the Orton Society. And a cross-section of the thinking and the activities of the members of the Orton Society will be found elsewhere in this number. Dr. Orton's contribution to the understanding of children with specific language problems and his faith that they can be saved from failure and frustration by proper training methods have served as beacons to countless workers for the past 30 years and are still pointing away for further exploration and service. That's just a wonderful way to end the introductory paragraph. And it makes me think of Dr. Hinschelwood and his calling back to always having hope for children and believing that these children can be remediated and taught with the correct methods. And of course, stress on the correct methods. It may be of interest to turn back to 1925 for a moment to note some of the forces that were preparing the way for this new contribution from from neuropsychiatry. To education and children's problems. It was a period in which a great deal of attention was being given to the teaching of reading following the upheaval in educational philosophy from which the freedom of the so-called, in quotes, progressive school movement and the introduction of the whole word or sight reading methods of reading arose. The teaching of phonics was actually to be forbidden in many schools for a number of years. Well, drills and discipline alike were frowned upon in many circles. Psychiatry at this time was just beginning to come out of the state hospitals into the community through the establishment of outpatient departments, and psychopathic hospitals were being built for the study and treatment of early cases of mental disorder. Psychiatrists and psychologists, then as now, were seeing the causes of juvenile delinquency. And the Commonwealth Fund was establishing the first child guidance clinics as we know them today with the professional team approach. So just to pause for a minute. It's really interesting that she notes the reading pedagogy of the time, that there was a shift from teaching phonics to teaching progressive methods and which were site words whole word reading. And this is going to be a theme in some of Orton's writings that this change in methods actually contributes to reading failure for many kids who are challenged because it doesn't meet their needs. She ends the paragraph with talking about how offices and posts are set up so that doctors can start seeing children who have challenges. So to continue, after World War I, Dr. Orton was called from his position as scientific director of the Pennsylvania Hospital for Mental Diseases to become the professor of psychiatry at the medical school of the State University of Iowa and there to build and direct a state psychopathic hospital. This became an active research and teaching center, and by 1925 there had developed enough general interest in mental health throughout the state. To warrant the organization of an experimental mobile mental hygiene clinic to serve outlying communities under Dr. Orton's direction. it was in the first of these clinics held in Green County, Iowa, that Dr. Orton came across MP, a 16 year old boy in a junior high school. Who had never been able to learn to read. This boy was later studied intensively by Dr. Orton and his staff for several months at the hospital. The clinic, in the meantime, found a number of other children referred because of behavior or learning difficulties, who proved normal in every respect except for a specific delay in reading, and so a series of cases with various degrees of severity became available for further study. So we're seeing some interesting trends we know Hinschelwood studied cases of varying severity. Hinschelwood noted aspects of emotional well-being. We're seeing that here, that children were referred because of behavior issues, but that was linked to the learning challenge rather than being a a fault of the student on their own. Dr. Orton was unusually well prepared for such investigations because he had been trained as a neuropathologist and at that time had studied more human brains post-mortem by laboratory methods than anyone else in the country. Well, that's a cool statistic. So, when we think about science of reading, it's a very good example about how, at the time Orton practiced. He was very advanced in and well versed in the science of his time and knowing what was happening. So we can't can't dispute that. He had also been especially interested in correlating clinical symptoms with anatomical findings in the cases of patients who before death had suffered a loss or impairment of their language function through injury to the brain. Cases of aphasia, alexia, agraphia, etc. So this is a reminder. To some of those earlier scientists we talked about that looked at brain injury due to disease or injury of some type and how that affected their abilities for reading, writing, and what have you. So this was a theme that Orton continued. The difficulties of the school children in learning to read struck him as somewhat similar to the conditions of these adult patients, but at the same time fundamentally different because the children showed no evidence whatsoever of brain damage or brain defects. So again, echoes of Orton's thinking to the previous researchers and especially to Pringle Morgan and his study of Percy. And connecting those ideas there, that whatever area is affected is the same area that's affected in adults through injury of some type. Okay. They seem particularly confused, moreover, when it came to remembering whole word patterns and the orientation of letters. So, meaning they couldn't learn through whole word reading. So, Dr. Orton coined the term strephosymbolia or twisted symbols to describe their difficulty. He looked upon this condition as a developmental delay, which should yield to proper methods of training. So, developmental in the sense that it's congenital. Students are born with these literacy challenges, but with proper training, proper remediation, proper support, they can be helped. And that hope is there for them to learn how to read. Following a presentation of his studies of MP and the other Iowa cases to the American Neurological Association in the spring of 1925, Dr. Orton received a grant of $60,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation to continue the mobile mental hygiene clinics and his research in language disabilities. After a trip abroad to confer with Dr. Henry Head and other neurologists, Dr. Orton assembled an outstanding clinic and research staff, which included a brain anatomist from Holland, a psychologist, Miss Marianne Monroe from Harvard, graduate students in psychology and speech and other disciplines. Coordinated studies of stutterers were carried on by Dr. Orton and Dr. Lee Travis, while Dr. Loretta Bender worked in brain pathology on a fellowship in Europe. Tests were devised and teaching methods were tried out on a group of children with specific reading problems in a summer school program at the hospital. At the conclusion of this experimental work, Dr. Orton left Iowa City and spent several months in Columbus, Ohio, writing up the results of the research studies. The Columbus School for Girls was the first private school to make use of Dr. Orton's contributions to education. The headmistress, Grace Jones McClure, Referred several of her pupils to Dr. Orton for diagnosis and arranged for one of her teachers, Miss Marion Bradley, to carry out remedial work under his direction. When Dr. Orton moved to New York City in 1928, Mrs. McClure put some of the private schools there in touch with him and thus began his 20 years of consultations, teacher training, and research in that area. Dr. Orton was appointed neuropathologist for the New York Neurological Institute and professor of neurology and neuropathology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. He became president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1929 and later headed the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease. He devoted considerable time to editorial work for the neurological journals. These were busy days indeed. But it was not long before Dr. Orton embarked upon a second research program, really a continuation of the first, under the auspices of the Neurological Institute, with aid again from the Rockefeller Foundation and quarters in the New York Psychiatric Institute. So we are seeing in his biography just how esteemed he was in his profession. He held, posts of leadership. He held professorships in well-known colleges and universities and was a real leader. This language research project, as it was known, served as a clinic for pupils with reading problems who lived in the neighborhood or who came across the river from New Jersey, and it provided an opportunity for further research into teaching methods and for the training of other workers. Dr. Earl Cheshire and Dr. Paul Dozier served in turn as Dr. Orton's research assistants, and Dr. Edwin Cole, a Harvard neurologist, came down from Boston for a period of work with them. Among the teachers who contributed to the language research project and received special training there were Miss Anna Gillingham, and that's the Gillingham of Orton Gillingham. We'll spend some time in our History of Dyslexia series focusing on Anna Gillingham. Who she was in her work. So other teachers were Miss Charlotte Pardy, Mr. Paige Sharpe, Mr. Warren Kohler, Miss Ellen Donahue, and Miss Elizabeth Peabody. Coming to learn from Dr. Orton, they became leaders in the field themselves and have since trained many other teachers to work with Dr. Orton's concepts. It was a happy climax to the first 10 years of Dr. Orton's pioneer work in this field. When he received the Salmon Memorial Lectureship Award in nineteen thirty-six as the Outstanding Psychiatrist of the Year. His three Salmon lectures at the New York Academy of Medicine were published in the form of a book entitled Reading, Writing, and Speech Problems in Children, which still remains the classic textbook in this field. And that is true. It is possible to get that book and to read, hi his writings. The second decade of Dr. Orton's work with children with language disabilities continued in New York with a growing private practice and he devoted a great deal of time and strength to the training of individual tutors for his patients and to the development of resources within various private schools and summer camps to meet their year round needs. Many a boy, now grown, Remembers the delightful talks with Dr. Orton at his office and his rare ability to understand just what was troubling the boy and at the same time to help him forget his troubles by talking about the very things that he was most interested in outside of school. Several of the young men who came to Dr. Orton as tutors were inspired to go on into medicine. Other teachers had the opportunity to work with pupil after pupil until they too became qualified tutors. Speech teachers came to learn and to contribute. Those working with aphagics under Dr. Orton's direction found that much that had proved to be valuable in his work with children was directly applicable to their cases as well. Okay, what does that mean? That means people who had aphasia or loss of reading skills, the adults could be remediated and taught through Dr. Orton's methods. And we learn about this as well in Dr. Hinchelwood's work in nineteen seventeen and from his book where he talks about trying to remediate people with aphasia to see if that's a possibility or not. World War II took the younger men into service but brought to this country Mrs. Catherine de Hirsch, LCST. She had known of Dr. Orton's work while engaged in speech therapy with war aphasics in London. And became a valued consultant, applying many of Dr. Orton's findings about reading disabilities to her work with children with developmental speech problems. During these years, others who had had their early training with Dr. Orton matured into strong leaders and developed the work in various centers. Dr. Peter Gao at the Gao School in Western New York State, and the Gao School is still in existence. It's a day residential school for children with learning disabilities and dyslexia. Mr. Pai Sharp in Hartford and at Wrangley, Maine, Miss Helen DuBroux in Washington, DC, and later at Andover at Camp Mansfield in Vermont, Mr. Harlan Sexton at Taft School and with Mrs. Sexton in Waterbury, Connecticut, Dr. Cole and Mrs. Mildred Plunkett in the meantime helped many patients and trained many new teachers at the Massachusetts General Hospital Language Clinic. Will Mrs. Donahue work with aphagic veterans in that area? Miss Gillingham and Miss Bessie Stillman found the same problems in their work in Hawaii as at Fieldston and after their manual of remedial procedures was completed in 1946, copies were sold around the world. Miss Gillingham's services as a consultant and a teacher of teachers were sought by many schools in the East and the Middle West. And her pupil and associate, Mrs. Sally Childs, also became a leader in remedial reading circles. So we can see the influence that Orton had on this whole field. Just knowing his positions that he held, the training he had, how he trained others, and those people went on to establish centers and do work. And you know, we'll come back to Gillingham and Stillman and their manual. during a second decade of his work, Dr. Orton received an unsolicited grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for a third research program. He was fortunate in securing Dr. David G. Wright from Philadelphia to be his research associate and they began, among other projects, the study of the motor coordination of pupils with reading difficulties with reading disabilities at a school in Connecticut Through the use of slow-motion picture films. That's really cool. Later, part of the grant was used to further the work of the Reading Clinic at the Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital. This had been started by Dr. Dozier and was continued by Dr. Wright until he too was called into service, after which Dr. Orton himself supervised the teacher left in charge by weekly visits to Philadelphia. These were difficult trips during the war when the weather was bitter and transportation uncertain, but it was the type of service that the older generation of doctors was giving everywhere, even at the expense of their health, as was the case with Dr. Orton. A happy trip to Philadelphia was upon the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of his graduation from the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania, at which time he was granted an honorary Doctor of Science degree from that institution. In the fall of 1948, Dr. Orton closed his office, planning to retire to his country home, Whimsey, which he had been building by hand with great enjoyment for a number of years. But this was not to be. An accident precipitated his death only a couple months later at the age of 69. This, however, does not mark the end of the Orton story, for his work has continued through another decade right up to the present time. So remembering that this article was written nineteen fifty-seven. Following Dr. Orton's death, there was naturally at first a feeling of desolation and the loss of a great leader, but then came a rededication on the part of those who had been most closely associated with Dr. Orton to carry forward his important work with renewed earnestness. Within a year, the Orton Society was formed. Annual meetings were planned to bring together those who had started their work under Orton. So that they might continue to learn from one another and share their experiences with the rising generation of doctors and teachers who had not had the opportunity of knowing Dr. Orton personally. In these meetings, which have been held in New York each fall, members of the Society have presented outstanding papers. On all of the major language disability problems with which Dr. Orton was concerned, reviewing his findings and theories in the light of their own experiences. Interest has also been shown in teacher training and group work for selected pupils to prevent academic failure due to reading disability. Teacher training in this field has proved most effective when carried out by a combination of lecture and apprenticeship methods. But a growing need is being expressed for orientation courses to help the classroom teacher to recognize the specific reading disability cases and provide special training for them when possible in small groups. Okay, this is a theme we are seeing. And it's even needed today. we saw Dr. Hinshelwood and his desire to want to spread news, spread the word so that people could recognize congenital word blindness or dyslexia and could then, diagnose and have proper treatment. We're seeing themes here from June Orton's writing about Dr. Orton and his legacy, that same need. The teacher training need, To be able to recognize aspects of learning disability with regard to reading, spelling, and whatnot, so that can be supported. Fast forward to today, we are still wanting good teacher training. and we are, not quite there yet. So, elementary school teachers, high school teachers, people can recognize these signs and then find ways to support. This has been demonstrated very successfully in certain private schools, such as the Frances Parker School in Chicago, Sidwell Friends in Washington, and the Fieldston Lower School, where Miss Gillingham supervised problem prevention programs for a number of years. So, problem prevention programs. That's a lot of alliteration, but my guess it had a lot to do with intervention and support. And we're going to look at some of her papers where she has some very very interesting methods to do this prevention. Her interest in this aspect of the work began in collaboration with Dr. Orton and has led to methods for the successful selection of pupils with potential reading disability before they enter the first grade, followed by special instruction in a small group throughout their first three or four years in school. Well, okay, to me that sounds exactly like what what is happening now. We're screening kids We're trying to give them intensive intervention and we're seeing seeds of this, that Anna Gillingham started to flag kids, to teach them, to ensure that, they don't fall through the cracks. Another interest, genetic research, is represented by the group headed by Dr. Jay Roswell Gallagher, formerly school physician at Andover Academy and now director of the adolescent unit of the Children's Hospital in Boston. she doesn't elaborate on what that means, but I'm wondering if as in Hinchelwood's book, it's talking about the hereditary connection or hereditary factor to dyslexia. Okay, the in the last paragraph here. New members have brought new ideas into the discussion at the meetings of the Orton Society, and its proceedings are read by many others in the annual bulletin of the Orton Society. This Dr. Orton's work continues to spread in ever-widening circles, and we look to the new generation to write additional chapters to the Orton story. So that's the end of that article by June Orton. And it gives us a really good snapshot of the kind of person Dr. Orton was in terms of a professional viewpoint, his learning, the positions he held, the influence he had. the great amount of mentoring and teaching he did so the others could carry on this work. And then of course, part of our discussion too will be talking about June Orton and her role in carrying on his legacy and even understanding her important role in the work she did with him. so that will be in episodes coming up. All right, so thank you for tuning in. If you are interested, please like and subscribe, share, all that good stuff. You can go to learnliteracy.com for information on Orton Gillingham trainings and learning about structured literacy and dyslexia. And in the meantime, keep promoting language for life so we can ensure and stay hopeful that all kids learn language for life and literacy through language and structure. Thank you.