It’s astonishing to think that the first person to be diagnosed with autism, Donald Triplett, has died.
Donald reached the grand old age of 89, and was diagnosed in childhood. Before the 1940s, effectively, autism did not medically exist. A condition which didn’t appear out of nowhere, and forms part of a range of conditions with which a fifth of the population can identify. A fifth of the global population is neurodivergent.
Another condition, ADHD, was first noticed by the Scottish doctor Alexander Crichton in the late eighteenth century, but wasn’t diagnosed formally until the 1960s, having traits reclassified again in the '80s and '90s.
