Historical Perspective
From Cleopatra to Richard Branson, dyslexia has probably been present always during the history of mankind, even before writing systems were developed.
A review of the history of dyslexia can be seen in four stages. The first stage is the origins of dyslexia; the first reference to dyslexia was in 1860 where it was noted that some patients who had suffered a brain injury or a cerebral vascular injury lost the ability to read or speak. A German physician named this condition as “alexia” or “word blindness.” As more and more patience were noted with this, two types or word blindness were found. One type, a person could not read or write and in the other the person was able to write but was still unable to read.
The development of dyslexia (second stage) was discovered and first reported in The British Medical Journal, 7th November 1896. “A case of Congenital Word Blindness” by W Pringle Morgan. It was an account of a 14 year old boy named Percy. “...in spite of this laborious and persistent training, he can only with difficulty spell out words of one syllable”. “The schoolmaster who taught him for some years says that he would be the smartest lad in the school if the instructions were entirely oral.” (The Dyslexia Handbook 1996, pg11-14)
One of the most important figures in the development of dyslexia was Samuel Torrey Orton, an American physician who pioneered the study of learning disabilities between 1925-1948 and moulded the evolution of the study of dyslexia.
During 1950-1970, the evolution of dyslexia began (third stage) up until Orton; dyslexia was almost an exclusive field for physicians. Between 1950-1970 dyslexia was shared also by psychologists, sociologists, and educators. It was this competition between clinicians and researchers that contributed to new theories about the causes and the symptoms of dyslexia.
After 1970 up until 2000 the foundations of our current knowledge were created through the foundations of modern theories (forth stage). After the 1970s the most compelling results were seen through newborn disciplines such as cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
Through the scientific study of dyslexia, scientists were able to demonstrate the importance of language, and speech in particular, to the development of reading skills, Scientists described the relationship between human speech and phoneme awareness, and claimed that poor-readers’ difficulties are usually linguistic in origin, specially rooted in the misuse of phonological structure and segmentation. During this study in the other researchers such as Naidoo (1972) observed that dyslexics had memory problems, especially with storage capacity, claiming that dyslexics could experience other problems besides phonological deficits.
In summary the study of dyslexia is an interdisciplinary between psychologists, sociologists, and educators. Researchers hope that the answers to this learning disability lies in the intersection of all these disciplines, and with this in mind they foster the collaboration of all dyslexia research.