The act of speech carries with it the hopes, fears and all the peculiar ranges of emotion capable by humanity. "The limits of my language are the limits of my world," wrote philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who spent much of his life studying the meaning of language. As we speak, we unravel the mystery of language and life every day.

When Benson Bobrick set out to document the history of stuttering in his book, "Knotted Tongues: Stuttering in History and the Quest for a Cure," he wanted to give a clearer picture of the diagnostic and social history of a malady that is often misunderstood. "It has this intermittent character," he says of stuttering. "It's very difficult for those who don't stutter to understand why if someone could be fluent in one moment, they can't be fluent in another."

Bobrick, who stutters himself, found that history is full of bizarre and, at times, cruel examples of how society has treated those who stutter--both socially and medically. With the earliest accounts dating back more than 2500 years, remedies spanned from horrible surgeries that cut out portions of the tongue to the use of artificial speech machines. Theories about the cause of stuttering, still not fully understood today, ranged from the notion that it results from a collision of ideas to an unwillingness to utter unspeakable thoughts to even an abnormal sexual fixation.

If language is the expression of our collective humanity and we are defined by our capacity to communicate, Bobrick's social history documents a scientific journey and measures its impact on people.