You can’t find a history of autism, or the term, prior to 1911 when Eugen Bleuler defined autism as a detachment from reality in terms of understanding schizophrenia. Try reaching for an autism history into the 19th century and beyond, and you won’t find it, necessarily. Historians of autism, and there are few, draw upon historical figures that possess our modern understanding of autistic traits as presented in the DSM IV. Some of these historians include Uta Frith, Mitzi Waltz, Harlan Lane and Michael Fitzgerald. Waltz’s book Autism: A Social and Medical History, is about to be released. It has been said that the practice of identifying autistic people in history is a bit like diagnosing the dead. Skepticism around the practice, perhaps assisted by current autism hype and politics, I would argue, might deter some historians from venturing into it.
In this post, I will cite the work of disability historian Geoffrey Reaume and his call for more research into the history of disability, and the proper saving of it amidst the tenuous nature of information located on the Internet. I will point out how autism history is relatively modern, how it can be in jeopardy by virtue of the “movement” for rights and recognition occuring online. To this latter point, I will mention The Autism Acceptance Project (TAAP) and its event The Joy of Autism: Redefining Ability and Quality of Life (2007) to illustrate how I, as its organizer and curator working with autistic board members and an autistic advisory committee, attempted to capture a recent autism history/movement by illustrating a few of the steps of assembly and dissemination as an historical exercise in itself. I attempt to illustrate potential issues and pitfalls in archiving a modern autism history. From reading Reaume, documenting thoughts, method and people is an important part of documenting history. This is already a long blog post and the topic deserves more attention than this format can provide. Finally, I will suggest that autism is still largely absent in the wider disability discourse, which might be more widely accepted if more research is done into the history of autism.
Collecting Autism History — Choices and Cautions:
The history of autism does not need to be limited to autistic people. As Geoffrey Reaume points out in his paper, Disability History in Canada: Present Work In the Field and Future Prospects, we need more research into the history of all disabilities including sensory disabilities, intellectual disabilities, physical disabilities, disability and eugenics, disability history as it intersects with race and immigration (and gender I would add), mad-people’s history, and activist histories. He does not, however, cite autism history, specifically. As I mentioned, because autism is a very recent diagnosis (1993), oral histories and autistic memoir have coincided with a recent disability rights movement of the 1960’s. These have contributed to a rapidly burgeoning Autism Rights Movement. We understand autism, therefore, in very modern terms and autism is still largely missing among a more vast body of disability history.
“In order to have a fuller sense of history, including where disabled people lead lives that are as mundane and full of contradictions as that of most people who are not disabled, a wide variety of sources need to be preserved and a wide variety of histories need to be told.” Reaume cautions us that the bulk of modern history, as it were, is locked up in our computers. One day, he argues, those computers will break down. The internet will dump our information; our emails are not printed on paper to be saved. Such correspondences have contributed to our understanding of how the disabled were treated and regarded by the medical profession. They also have illuminated the private lives and struggles of the disabled, as two examples.
This brings me to the thought of how much of our autism history, and the history of the Autism Rights Movement exploded online. Due to the very nature of computing and ease of use to communicate in this format for ma