Category Archives: Daily Writings

The Early History of Autism in America

The article talked about Billy who suffered with autism. He lived in a time when there was no medical terminology for the disease but people referred to autistic individuals as “idiots”. I think an interesting point to be made here is how far society has come in medical naming from slang.

Another autistic individual that was mentioned in the article was The Wild Boy of Aveyron who was found in the French forest who was a medical anomaly in the late 18th century.

Autism was around before there was even a term for the disability.

Today’s Reading Summary

The article first talks about the history of the discovery of autism. Originally they believed autism was not discovered until the mid 1900’s, however, sources show it may have been diagnosed earlier. After a background of the discovery of and diagnosis of autism, the article goes on to focus on a specific man who first started in teaching the blind how to read and write.  He later on did more work to benefit the autistic. I found it interesting that doctors think that autism could have been caused by some traumatic event earlier on in human history.

History of Autism Summary

The article contends that autism is probably not a recent development among our society, but its characteristics can be traced back to the 1800s during the time that Howe was implementing schools for the physically and mentally disabled.  He received a grant that allowed him to assemble information about these people who acted socially abnormally.  The author of the paper shows us that these documented characteristics are very similar to those found in autistic people today.  The article concludes with the idea that answers and information about autism could possibly be found in the past.

History of Autism

Todays reading introduced the medical condition of Autism. One point that I found interesting was the idea that Autism is never the same from patient to patient. Rather, the text explained that some struggled with numbers and memorization while others were extremely gifted in their quantitative abilities. I thoroughly enjoyed Howe’s point that those with Autism should not be claimed as “idiots” because some were extremely proficient in areas such as reading and musical abilities.

Autism in the Old Days

In the old day’s a lot of people were considered “idiots” because they were thought to be intellectually inferior to a lot of other people. although it turned out that a lot of those so called “idiots” possessed almost arcane abilities such as perfect pitch, the ability to multiply two and three digit numbers easily, and conversion skills from years to seconds. A lot of these people in modern day would be considered autistic.

The Early History of Idiots

In this reading, the author talks about the early history of autism, in which he emphasizes how autism was treated with disdain. Autism is a disease that has a wide variety of symptoms. Due to this, people in earlier times were often confused at whether to label them as “idiots,” which was the term used for people with mental illnesses or disabilities at the time. In one case, a young autistic boy had a great musical ability, but was greatly lacking skills in things such as mathematics. Although, there is still some inequality between “normal” people and those with disabilities, their treatment has greatly improved since then.A s time progressed and we learned more about the disabilities, those with them were given accomondations such as education that was made to help people with such disabilities.