Special Needs

Introduction

Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that is neurological in origin.

The term dyslexia is derived from Greek and means “difficulty (dys) with words (lexis)”. People with dyslexia may have problems with reading, spelling, understanding spoken words or expressing themselves orally or in writing.

It is estimated that up to 4% of children are severely dyslexic and up to 6% children have milder dyslexia type difficulties¹.

History

In 1672, Thomas Willis appears to have been the first medical practitioner to describe dyslexia in his De Anima Brutorum. A German physician, Adolf Kussmaul coined the phrase “word blindness” or alexia in 1877, to depict the inability of stroke victims to read despite being able to see, think and speak. Initially, dyslexia was seen as a specific neurological disorder as a result of some acquired brain trauma. In 1887, Professor Rudolf Berlin, an ophthalmologist was the first to use the term ‘dyslexia’ to describe the cases of extreme reading difficulty.

Dr Pringle Morgan, a Sussex GP reported in 1895, a fourteen year-old boy, named Percy, who had been unable to learn to read despite being of normal intelligence. He attributed Percy’s difficulties to a congenital defect with his visual memory for word s being defective or absent. In 1897, several cases similar to that of Percy’s were investigated and prompted several publishing of case studies by James Kerr, a Medical Officer of Health for Bradford.

James Hinshelwood, a Scottish ophthalmologist, published a series of articles in medical journals describing similar cases of congenital word blindness, which he defined as "a congenital defect occurring in children with otherwise normal and undamaged brains characterized by a difficulty in learning to read." In his 1917 book Congenital Word Blindness, Hinshelwood asserted that the primary disability was in visual memory for words and letters, and described symptoms including letter reversals, and difficulties with spelling and reading comprehension.

A key early researcher in dyslexia was Samuel T. Orton, an American neuro psychiatrist who worked with 125 school children and found that some of them seemed to have a specific reading impairment which he called ‘strephosymbolia’ or twisted words. Orton is also known to be one of the first medical practitioners to advance the importance of educational interventions.

References