History of dyslexia
Dyslexia has always existed, but never posed a problem until children started learning to read and write at school. It then showed that some children were barely capable of mastering those skills.
Nevertheless, they performed well at other subjects. People wondered if maybe they were suffering from a handicap. The term dyslexia was first described in 1887 by Rudolf Berlin of Stuttgart, meaning "inability to read". In 1896, however, the English physician Dr. Pringle Morgan examined the 14-year-old Percy. Percy was intelligent, but unable to read or write. According to Morgan, Percy suffered from an eye defect. He was said to be word-blind, after which the handicap was called: word-blindness.
In the 70s, however, proof to the contrary was provided. The American psychologist Frank Vellutino showed with a number of experiments that children diagnosed with word-blindness had no difficulty seeing words. An example of these experiments was recognizing drawings that looked like characters.