http://goo.gl/S2Q7VC
Looking back, scholars have found a small number of cases suggestive of autism. The best known is the Wild Boy of Aveyron, later given the name Victor, who walked naked out of a French forest in 1799, unspeaking and uncivilized, giving birth to fantastic tales of a child raised by wolves; in recent decades experts have tended to believe that Victor was born autistic and abandoned by his parents. The behavior of the so-called Holy Fools of Russia, who went about nearly naked in winter, seemingly oblivious to the cold, speaking strangely and appearing uninterested in normal human interaction, has also been reinterpreted as autistic. And today’s neurodiversity movement, which argues that autism is not essentially a disability, but, rather, a variant of human brain wiring that merits respect, and even celebration, has led to posthumous claims of autistic identity for the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton and Thomas Jefferson.
As far as we can determine, we are the first to suggest the diagnosis for Howe’s numerous cases, who appear to constitute the earliest known collection of systematically observed people with probable autism in the United States. We came across them during the fourth year of research for our new book, In a Different Key: The Story of Autism, by which time our “radar” for autistic tendencies was fairly well-advanced. Granted, retrospective diagnosis of any sort of psychological state or developmental disability can never be anything but speculation. But Howe’s “Report Made to the Legislature of Massachusetts upon Idiocy,” which he presented in February of 1848, includes signals of classic autistic behavior so breathtakingly recognizable to anyone familiar with the condition’s manifestations that they cannot be ignored. Plus, his quantitative approach vouches for his credibility as an observer, despite the fact that he believed in phrenology, which purported to study the mind by mapping the cranium, long since relegated to the list of pseudosciences. Howe’s final report contained 45 pages of tabulated data, drawn from a sample of 574 people who were thoroughly examined by him or his colleagues in nearly 63 towns. The tables cover a wide range of measurements as well as intellectual and verbal capacities. Howe, extrapolating, estimated that Massachusetts had 1,200 “idiots.”
As far as we can determine, we are the first to suggest the diagnosis for Howe’s numerous cases, who appear to constitute the earliest known collection of systematically observed people with probable autism in the United States. We came across them during the fourth year of research for our new book, In a Different Key: The Story of Autism, by which time our “radar” for autistic tendencies was fairly well-advanced. Granted, retrospective diagnosis of any sort of psychological state or developmental disability can never be anything but speculation. But Howe’s “Report Made to the Legislature of Massachusetts upon Idiocy,” which he presented in February of 1848, includes signals of classic autistic behavior so breathtakingly recognizable to anyone familiar with the condition’s manifestations that they cannot be ignored. Plus, his quantitative approach vouches for his credibility as an observer, despite the fact that he believed in phrenology, which purported to study the mind by mapping the cranium, long since relegated to the list of pseudosciences. Howe’s final report contained 45 pages of tabulated data, drawn from a sample of 574 people who were thoroughly examined by him or his colleagues in nearly 63 towns. The tables cover a wide range of measurements as well as intellectual and verbal capacities. Howe, extrapolating, estimated that Massachusetts had 1,200 “idiots.”