When was dyslexia discovered

In the era of modern dyslexia, which followed the WBC and saw dyslexia institutionalised in British legislation, schooling and society, it was similarly middle-class parents who drove the foundation of organisations like the British Dyslexia Association and Dyslexia Institute Kirby, c. Prior to state recognition of dyslexia, concerned parents with personal resources were the only way in which children with dyslexia could receive support.

Again, the same caveats apply as in the discussion above. For some parents of means, perhaps of children with mild dyslexic difficulties, the dyslexia diagnosis has conceivably been a label pursued for its own sake. This, despite the original association of dyslexia with middle-class groups stemming from an absence of support elsewhere, and so the need to mobilise middle-class social and financial capitals to acquire assistance.

Given the absence of substantial state dyslexia support until the s, it is difficult to see how early interest in the area could have been undertaken by persons other than those of independent financial means. Ongoing critiques of dyslexia as a label unfairly sought, perhaps even invented, by middle-class parents, ignores the fact that this group were necessarily amongst the first to recognise dyslexic difficulties. As with autism and ADHD, a correlation of these conditions with middle-class groups tells us more about the society in which they exist, than the validity of the conditions themselves.

The first cases of dyslexia were identified where children were otherwise intellectually able, it being believed that, if pupils struggled generally, there was no way to determine if their reading difficulties were isolated or because of general learning problems. Until the s, it was a key mode through which dyslexia was diagnosed in children. When the model was superseded by researchers who discovered that dyslexic difficulties existed across the intellectual spectrum, it remained in the popular consciousness — and is still invoked today, by representatives from both sides of the debate, for opposing purposes.

For proponents of the term often campaigners and advocates , it is a rebuke to those who suggest that dyslexia is a synonym for low intelligence, and a way to empower those with dyslexia. For detractors, it is used to question the motivations of parents who seek the dyslexia label for their children. The discrepancy diagnostic model was once the accepted scientific tool of diagnosis, but no longer — those who use it, use it incorrectly. In this way, supporters and critics of the term perpetuate discussion of the discrepancy diagnostic model, first outlined by the case studies of Hinshelwood and Pringle Morgan, for social, rather than scientific, purchase.

For Elliott and Grigorenko a , p. In other words, the notion that dyslexia is a label frequently sought by vested interests — e. As the short history above implies, there was little systematic attention to dyslexia at the time he was writing. Indeed, Millfield, the first school to specifically assist a child with dyslexic difficulties, did so only in It was another 20 years before the Word Blind Centre for Dyslexic Children opened its doors: the first centre in the country dedicated to better understanding and ameliorating reading difficulties.

Arguments stating that dyslexia is over-diagnosed, therefore, seem as much a feature of social commentary around dyslexia, as of scientific debate.

Beyond this, it has sought to show that scientific debates around dyslexia have rarely, if ever, been divorced from the social contexts in which dyslexia has existed.

Despite them, dyslexia has gone from a niche concern of Victorian medics, to a widely-known condition that attracts substantial state support.

Over recent decades substantial progress has been made in understanding reading problems, and in helping the children who possess them, and the dyslexia debate should not obfuscate these achievements.

Hitherto, pupils exhibiting these difficulties were frequently derided as lost educational causes an argument echoed by some of the media commentators in the Introduction. Rather, they stem, in part, from a collection of late 19th and early 20th century arguments, which dyslexia has never completely shaken off.

This is especially true in the case of definition. As Victorian debates show, for non-visible cognitive impairments, such as dyslexia, an absence of definitive description has always fostered dissenters. In this way, understanding of dyslexia has developed in the standard scientific fashion — with the proposal of theories, their refutation, and so forth Kuhn, If dyslexia is a scientific universal, why does it have such particular associations?

A logical response today might be to broaden, rather than diminish, dyslexia support in state education, where children are less likely to have access to the diagnoses of private educational psychologists. One reading of this history, of course, is that arguments against dyslexia endure precisely because they have never been adequately resolved by current proponents of the term in the science of reading. From this viewpoint, their recurrence across time increases, rather than decreases, their validity.

Part of the purpose of this article, though, has been to show that the blurring of the social and the scientific in critiques of dyslexia makes it difficult for those in the science of reading to respond to such critiques alone. But this is not the same as saying that all parents have been so motivated, nor that the cynicism of such a minority reflects an underlying scientific problem with the concept.

Moreover, the history of dyslexia shows that the role of concerned parents in its history has not been a sinister plot to acquire undeserved funding, but a necessary reaction to the absence of state support for reading difficulties and so any other pathway to assistance. Like debates around many scientific concepts — from climate change to depression — discussion of dyslexia incorporates the social, the cultural and the political, as well as the scientific.

As such, better understanding its history helps to untangle dyslexia as a term — a task especially necessary when critiques, despite claiming scientific backing, are often predicated on social rather than scientific beliefs. As such, the debate can be informed by a historical perspective. Prior to the History of Dyslexia project, he worked in education policy at the Sutton Trust; and undertook PhD and post-doctoral research in political geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, and the University of Exeter, respectively.

National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Oxford Review of Education. Oxf Rev Educ. Published online Aug Philip Kirby. Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer. This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. My thoughts on the dyslexia debate. Health: Spectrum conditions. UK Parliament. In defence of dyslexia. Dyslexia diagnosis, scientific understandings, and belief in a flat Earth. Introduction: dyslexia and its discontents Dyslexia remains one of the more controversial terms in education policy and practice.

The dyslexia debate: how a historical approach can contribute To contextualise the discussion here, a working definition of dyslexia is required. In the Rose Review, dyslexia is defined as a learning difficulty that primarily affects the skills involved in accurate and fluent word reading and spelling. Discussion: dyslexia debated, then and now Dyslexia and its ambiguous definition Today, perhaps the pre-eminent criticism of dyslexia is that its definition is ambiguous.

Dyslexia and the middle-classes Moreover, it was necessarily parents from wealthier socio-economic backgrounds who were better able to bring dyslexia to the attention of such professionals. Conclusion: heard it all before? Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Parents of children with learning disabilities like dyslexia have more rights to hold schools accountable to offer services for those students who learn differently. Skip to content. The History of Dyslexia. Please share.

Related posts:. Does My Child Have Dyslexia? A parent's Guide to Identification. Today, reading and spelling difficulties are still considered central to dyslexia, but other skills are believed to be affected, too.

These includes motor coordination, concentration and personal organisation. Interest in dyslexia waned between the World Wars, but emerged again in the early s with the creation of the Word Blind Centre in The centre brought together several researchers, including the neurologist Macdonald Critchley and the psychologist Tim Miles, who had encountered dyslexic children in their work.

The centre closed after a decade, but its principal director, Sandhya Naidoo, published one of the first major studies into the condition, Specific Dyslexia , in During the same period, larger organisations were being founded to help dyslexic children.

And in , the Helen Arkell Centre also opened. Dyslexia was now on the map. The motivation for these pioneers was often personal. Marion Welchman had observed the lack of provision and sympathy at school for her dyslexic son, Howard. The cases describe the experiences of patients who suffered brain damage from causes like stroke, traumatic brain injury, dementia, or infection.

Kussmaul invented the term word blindness to describe those with normal vision and intellect who lose the ability to read words while maintaining the ability to speak normally and in some cases even to write. Today, these individuals would be diagnosed with a form of acquired dyslexia, or dyslexia that develops as the result of brain injury. Six years later, a fellow German, ophthalmologist Rudolf Berlin, coined the term dyslexia The published observations of children like Percy by neuroscientists, ophthalmologists, and physicians from this time are among the earliest accounts of what is today known as developmental dyslexia , a genetic, brain-based reading disability that impairs learning to read.

In the early part of the 20th century, James Hinshelwood in Great Britain and Samuel Orton in the United States would explore dyslexia in children with great enthusiasm, paving the way for the advocacy, research, and supports that arose in the 60s and 70s and still continue today. Study of the brain in the 19th century was a slow, two-step process. First, physicians chronicled the details of medical cases over time, sometimes following patients for several years.

Victorian-era scientists were able to map the locations of specific brain functions by combining details of the symptoms in their cases with the locations of brain lesions—areas destroyed by disease, loss of blood supply, or injury—identified by postmortem autopsy. The medical community shared their cases with one another in lectures and journals, allowing the field to build upon their collective experience.

In this way, three important areas of the reading network were identified before the turn of the century:. The remarkable identification of these three areas was important not only for understanding language processing but also in providing evidence of the theory of specialized areas of the brain for specific tasks. While each of the areas discovered in the examples above was thought at the time of discovery to serve a single function, neurologists have since shown that other parts of the language network contribute to those functions and that those areas, in turn, contribute to additional processes themselves.