Dyslexia And Adhd

Dyslexia And Adhd

Blog Article

The History of Dyslexia
The term dyslexia has been shaped by ophthalmology, psychology, and advocacy. The development of dyslexia as a concept is closely linked to wider developments in Western society, such as increasing literacy and schooling and the growth of civil societies.


Despite the controversy that has swirled around dyslexia, it appears to have become firmly established in professional and public vocabularies. However, a precise definition remains elusive.

Adolph Kussmaul
Kussmaul and his contemporaries were working at a time of significant change in Western society - increasing demands on literacy, expanding schooling and medical training. They were also seeing a rise in neurologically impaired people with pronounced reading difficulties.

Rudolf Berlin used the term dyslexia in 1884 to bring a diagnosis of 'word blindness' in line with alexia and paralexia (Kirby, 2020). The word derives from the Greek dys meaning bad or insufficient and lexis, meaning words.

In his early publications Berlin referred to the dyslexia of patients who had lost their ability to read due to brain damage. However, in 1917 he updated the notes on two of these patients and provided no clinical descriptors which conveyed their dyslexia. Moreover, his interest was in articulation, stammering and writing not in reading.

Rudolf Berlin
In 1883 a German ophthalmologist, Rudolf Berlin, used the word dyslexia for the first time. He had observed a number of adults who struggled to read but could not find anything wrong with their eyesight or hearing. He believed that these patients suffered from a specific condition he called ‘dyslexia’ (from Greek words dys, meaning bad, and lexis, meaning words).

His work coincided with significant changes in Western society such as the spread of literacy and schooling and the growth of the medical profession. Nevertheless, many people remain resistant to the idea that dyslexia is a disability.

It is difficult to say why this reluctance persists but it may have been partly fuelled by the myth that dyslexia was a middle-class fantasy concocted by parents who wanted their children to get special treatment. The development of modern research on dyslexia and the success of campaigners to gain recognition for it has been slow and arduous.

James Kerr
The history of dyslexia is a story of change. The term has been a central part of the debate on reading difficulties and continues to be a major subject for research. The debate is expected to continue to grow and evolve as new discoveries shed light on the variables that encompass the term.

During the late 19th century, the concept of dyslexia began to crystallize. Its emergence coincided with changes in society and the medical profession that made it easier for people to process linguistic information.

In 1884, ophthalmologist Rudolf Berlin first used the term dyslexia in his patient notes. He derived it from the Greek words dys, meaning bad or ill, and lexis, meaning word. In this context, he described patients with brain lesions that impacted their ability to read but not their ability to speak. This type of reading difficulty is today known as acquired dyslexia. William Pringle Morgan's rubric of congenital word blindness became the dominant diagnostic construct pertaining to dyslexia for some 40 years.

William Pringle Morgan
The most significant controversy relates to the nature of dyslexia. It is now commonly recognised that most cases of dyslexia can be attributed to a subtle disorder of language processing (the phonological deficit) that happens to surface most prominently during reading acquisition. This is a far more convincing explanation than the alternative of visual letter confusions.

Nevertheless, some sources continue to cite Morgan as the first to recognise the clinical characteristics of what today is called developmental dyslexia or simply dyslexia. This text-to-speech tools for dyslexia is despite the fact that his term congenital word blindness and Berlin's corresponding naming of acquired dyslexia refer to very different phenomena.

It's worth pointing out that early reticence to acknowledge the existence of dyslexia stemmed largely from concerns that the condition was a "middle-class myth" used by parents seeking to excuse their otherwise able children's poor performance at school. This notion of a discrepancy between reading ability and intelligence remained prominent in the literature for several decades.