History of Dyslexia
Adolf Kussmaul. German neurologist
Many people would assume that dyslexia is a disorder that must have existed for a while, but it wasn't known until recently. The truth is that dyslexia has quite a short history, but it wasn't just discovered recently. It was actually first recognized in the mid-nineteenth century. A man by the name of Adolph Kussmaul, a German neurologist, discovered about the disorder when he was working with adults who were having problems with reading. He gave the term, "alexia", which meant "word blindness". He did this around 1878 to reflect the nature of this disorder. This term, "word blindness", was used in medical journals, papers, and other forms for some time before the term dyslexia was used. It was always used for similar symptoms of the disorder that Adolf Kussmaul first recorded. Time passed, but no medical expert or scientist was able to really determine the cause of of this disorder. The actual term of "dyslexia" came into affect at around 1887 by a medical expert named Rudolf Berlin.
Advancement in the study of Dyslexia
Rudolf Berlin. Medical expert
Soon, an amazing discovery came to be associated with dyslexia. In 1891, a report made by Dr. Dejerne, stated that a patient lost powers of reading and language functions after taking a brain injury. Even though dyslexia was used more for the term, "word blindness", this patient was associated with dyslexia. This was the first time dyslexia was ever used as a form of brain injury. This sparked a lot of attention, in which a study was taken place to find out what else can be described as dyslexia. Soon, many theories that were developed that dealt with reading disabilities that also linked to brain dysfunctionality were accepted as forms of dyslexia.
Wrapping it up
Many medical experts seem to already so much about dyslexia. We as humans, seem to learn more about the disorder in leaps of information (in other words, when some more information is found out about this disorder, we seem to continue to find more and more). This doesn't mean that humans know all about the disorder. There is still a lot of mystery to dyslexia. maybe soon we'll be able to discover the full truth of dyslexia.