In 36 years of work at the Mayo Clinic, he treated patients, mentored students and led research that made him an authority in his field.
In 1990, a researcher speaking to a group of neurologists told a patient story that was so unusual, a write-up of the case study was published in newspapers across the country.
The researcher described a Baltimore man who suddenly began speaking with a Scandinavian accent after suffering a stroke. The man had no experience with foreign languages, the researcher explained, yet he sounded Nordic and unfamiliar with English.
The patient suffered from a rare condition known as foreign-accent syndrome, and the reporter writing the story reached out to Mayo Clinic researcher Arnold Aronson for help understanding the problem.
Aronson, of Minneapolis, died Nov. 1 after suffering a recent stroke and congestive heart failure. He was 90. In 36 years of work at the Mayo Clinic, he treated patients, mentored students and led research that made him an authority in the diagnosis of motor speech disorders and the treatment of voice disorders, said Joseph Duffy, an emeritus consultant and speech pathology professor at the Mayo Clinic.
Aronson was born in Milwaukee and earned degrees in speech pathology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps before becoming a professor at the Mayo Clinic.
Aronson started working at the clinic in 1962 and served as head of speech pathology in the neurology department from 1979 until 1992. He wrote influential books in the field and co-authored key research papers that established how the profession approaches classification of motor speech disorders, according to Duffy.
Foreign-accent syndrome was one of several rare voice disorders that Aronson specialized in throughout his career, said daughter Ann Aronson of Minneapolis. The unusual cases came with the territory at Mayo, she said, since patients came to Rochester when they couldn’t find answers from clinicians close to home.
Outside of work, Aronson was an amateur pilot who loved reading nonfiction, particularly books about World War II. He started playing violin at age 5, and picked it up periodically throughout his life. In his 60s, Aronson took up tap dancing.