We start with an imagea tiny, golden child on hands and knees, circling round and round a spot on the floor in mysterious, self-absorbed delight. She does not look up, though she is smiling and laughing; she does not call our attention to the mysterious object of her pleasure. She does not see us at all. She and the spot are all there is, and though she is eighteen months old, an age for touching, tasting, pointing, pushing, exploring, she is doing none of these. She does not walk, or crawl up stairs, or pull herself to her feet to reach for objects. She doesnt want any objects. Instead, she circles her spot. Or she sits, a long chain in her hand, snaking it up and down, up and down, watching it coil and uncoil, for twenty minutes, half an hour--- until someone comes, moves her or feeds her or gives her another toy, or perhaps a book. Excerpted from The Siege By Clara Claiborne Park. Autism is a very mysterious disease that people know so little about. Nobody is for certain how this disease came about but it now well known in todays society. HistoryIt has been presumed that before the discovery of the pattern of symptoms now known as autism, that people did exist with the syndrome, and were lumped together either with the mentally retarded or the insane. We might expect to have inherited sufficiently-detailed descriptions of such people that we would be able to see a pattern suggesting autism among them, but there have not been many descriptions that suggest autism. One such description is of a boy found in the 19th century named Victor. At the time, some assumed he had grown up without human contact in the forest. The story was recorded in the book The Wild Boy of Aveyron. (Bettleheim, 1994)Leo Kanner published his first paper identifying autistic children in 1943, asserting he had noticed such children since 1938. Before Kanner noticed and recorded a pattern of symptoms, such children would be classified as emotionally disturbed or ...
