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Purpose: To provide the current speech-language pathologist with a historical perspective of voice management of children and adults in the time period 1940-1970, employing both literature citation and personal anecdotal experience.

Method: Each decade of the time period 1940-1970 has been reviewed specific to available literature, descriptions of existing clinical voice services available, and the personal academic and clinical training of the author and his subsequent professional experiences. Equipment availability for use in measurement and treatment of respiratory and resonance problems was well established in the 1940s and early 1950s. Equipment for measuring voice pitch and voice quality arrived much later. For much of this time period, the treatment of vocal hyperfunction was primarily provided by psychologists and psychiatrists.

Results: As we review the practice of clinical voice 40-60 years ago, we appreciate this past influence on what we do today in voice management.

Conclusions: Without the benefit of computer assist and related instrumentation that we have today, voice management in past time periods appears to have been remarkably successful.

This article provides an overview of the history of laryngeal illumination as it informs current clinical practice. We argue that two pioneers, G. Paul Moore and Hans von Leden, were critical to the development of the analysis and interpretation of laryngeal images. The material presented here was originally part of a Short Course at the 2009 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Convention. For readers desiring greater detail, references to key articles are provided.

Despite many years of research, we still do not know how to measure vocal quality. This paper reviews the history of quality assessment, describes some reasons why current approaches are unlikely to be fruitful, and proposes an alternative approach that addresses the primary difficulties with existing protocols.

The goal of this essay is to emphasize the correspondence among interactive phonatory variables, complementary assessment measures, and voice problems. An additional related goal is to suggest that we pay close attention to figures and expressions that interrelate phonatory variables, for they can be strong guides to our therapeutic thinking. Acoustic and aerodynamic factors are the focus here. This essay is not historical per se, but rather interrelational.