Doctors once cut tongues to treat stuttering

A closer look

Because clearly, the best way to handle a speech impediment is to violently chop off the actual speech organ. In the 18th and 19th centuries, surgeons theorized that stuttering was caused by a spasm in the tongue muscle. Their brilliant solution was hemiglossectomy: slicing a massive wedge out of the patient's tongue without any anesthesia. Instead of curing the stutter, it mostly just caused people to bleed out or lose the ability to speak entirely.