Science Quote by Jean Rostand

A scientist’s deadpan is doing the heavy lifting here: Rostand turns a well-meaning “folk remedy” into a miniature lab report on human gullibility. The setup is almost clinical in its phrasing - “Somebody told me I should” - a passive construction that makes the advice feel anonymous, unaccountable, socially ambient. That’s the point. Bad ideas rarely arrive with a signature; they arrive as “something people say,” the soft tyranny of received wisdom.

Then he runs the experiment. Not with instruments, but with his own body, in the messiest possible arena: “during a scene,” a phrase that hints at performance, pressure, public exposure. Stuttering isn’t treated as a cute quirk; it’s a vulnerability made worse by the demand to speak on cue. The pebble is supposed to force clarity through obstruction, a crude behavioral hack. Rostand’s punchline is that the cure doesn’t just fail; it introduces a new risk. He swallows the pebble. The supposed solution becomes a literal hazard, a perfect comic embodiment of iatrogenesis: a “treatment” that creates harm.

“That was the end of that” lands like a clipped conclusion section: results observed, hypothesis discarded. The humor is dry, but the intent is pointed. Rostand isn’t only joking about stuttering; he’s indicting the casual confidence of amateur therapeutics and the social pressure to “fix” difference quickly, cheaply, and theatrically. In a few sentences, he elevates skepticism into style - not cynicism, exactly, but the scientist’s refusal to romanticize a bad method just because it’s memorable.