Hermann Gutzmann

Hermann Gutzmann (1865 to 1922) was a German physician who is regarded as the founder of phoniatrics, the medical study and treatment of voice and speech disorders. Born into a Jewish family in Bütow in Pomerania, he was the son of a well-known teacher of deaf children. He trained in medicine in Berlin and took his doctorate at the University of Berlin in 1887 with a dissertation on stuttering. From 1889 he practised as a specialist in diseases of the vocal organs, and in 1890 he and his father founded a journal devoted to speech therapy. He opened an outpatient clinic for the speech-impaired in Berlin in 1891, which later joined the Charité hospital, and from 1896 ran a private clinic and sanatorium in Zehlendorf. During the First World War he treated soldiers whose speech and voice had been damaged by trauma. He wrote thirteen books and more than three hundred papers, and he died of sepsis in 1922 after a wound from a gramophone needle.