In a Different Key: The Story of Autism (10 page)

Teaching Victor to speak, however, was a frustrating exercise. Itard wrote of his excitement when, one day, Victor began repeating the phrase
“Mon Dieu.”
It soon became clear, however, that he was only parroting something he had heard someone else say. He did learn to manipulate a set of steel alphabet letters to spell out a few words, but his comprehension of their meaning and use was minimal. He could communicate, and often did, by pantomiming—evidence that he had something to say. These gestures always related to his immediate desires—to eat, to go outside, to play the game where he was pushed about in a wheelbarrow. But in trying to teach him to say words aloud—even just to name things—Itard got nowhere.

A key problem was Victor’s unusually selective hearing. He shut
out certain sounds as though he were completely deaf to them. When Itard, as an experiment, came up behind him and fired a pistol twice into the air, Victor did not even flinch. The human voice was another sound that registered with Victor only feebly. But let someone crack a nut in the next room, and his head would jerk around in that direction.

Itard, who regarded language as the essential test of Victor’s intelligence, finally considered himself defeated. After five years, he stopped all teaching.
“Seeing that my efforts were leading nowhere,” he said, “I gave up my efforts to teach Victor to speak, and I abandoned him to a state of incurable muteness.” Itard would continue to work with mentally challenged people, making contributions to the theory and methodology that became the bedrock of special education as it developed for the next 150 years.

Victor spent his last years comfortably, treated with kindness. The state paid for his upkeep under the care of the married couple, who treated him almost as a son. He died in 1828 around the age of forty, far from the wilderness, having never spoken a full sentence, and always giving the appearance, like little Donald Triplett a century later, of being happiest when left alone.

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O
N
F
EBRUARY
26, 1848, a leather-bound report was delivered to the Massachusetts statehouse by one of the most compassionate activists the state had ever seen. Samuel Gridley Howe was the founder of the New England Asylum for the Blind, the institution that almost single-handedly changed the minds of Americans about the ability of blind people to benefit from an education. In both Europe and America, blindness was treated like deafness, lameness, epilepsy, or any apparent defect in typical organic functioning. Having a disability voided all claims to opportunity. Like those who could not hear or walk, those who could not see were written off as useless and broken. Educating them was regarded as absurd, until Howe proved otherwise.

Sometime around 1845, Howe had a new inspiration. He had learned that the French were making progress teaching people of impaired intellect, and that similar progress was being seen in Prussia.
Why shouldn’t he try to educate his three new students? Even though one of the boys was mute, he was able to achieve considerable success.

When he began to speak openly of the educability of this group of people generally labeled “idiots,” Howe encountered ridicule. This incensed him, as did the abuse heaped upon the mentally disabled. Writing to a powerful member of the Massachusetts legislature, Howe spoke of everyone’s shared duty
“to respect humanity in every form.” When society failed at this, he argued, “the community…suffers therefore in
its moral character.”

The result of Howe’s outrage was that leather-bound book, entitled
Report Made to the Legislature of Massachusetts upon Idiocy
. It compiled the results of an investigation he undertook in 1846 into the condition of the mentally disabled in Massachusetts. Funded by the taxpayers, Howe and two colleagues traveled on horseback to some sixty-three towns and villages across the state, examining more than five hundred people identified in each of these places as being the community’s “idiots.” The project took two years.

Packed with tables and data, Howe’s report was astonishingly comprehensive for its time. Howe told the legislature that Massachusetts was home to approximately 1,300 men, women, and children who fit the description for mental “idiocy.” This struck him as alarmingly high.

“The whole subject of idiocy is new,” Howe wrote in the text accompanying his data.
“Science has not yet thrown her certain light upon its remote, or even its proximate causes.” He was right. Little effort had ever been made to understand the nature of intellectual disability. Society had never seen the purpose in doing so.

Howe himself was not prepared for one of the findings he made on his two-year tour: A good many of the people who had been pointed out to him as “idiots,” he reported, did not seem to belong in that category. Upon close examination, he found many “who have some of the intellectual faculties well-developed, and yet are called idiots.” Far from fitting the label neatly, he said, they “upset every one of these definitions.”

There was the man named Billy, whom Howe listed as Case 27,
who “knows, and can sing correctly, more than two hundred tunes…and who will instantly detect a false note in any of them.” Also notable about Billy, whose age was given as fifty-nine, was that ordinary communication appeared beyond him. “If he is told to go and milk the cows, he stands and repeats over the words, ‘Billy go and milk the cows,’ for hours together, or until someone tells him something else, which he will repeat over in the same way.”

Billy was born about 140 years before Kanner began thinking about autism, but much of what Howe recorded—his talent for music, his apparently perfect pitch, and his seeming echolalia—would almost certainly have earned him a place on Kanner’s list.

Howe’s Case 360 might have made that list also: “This man has the perception of combination of numbers in an extraordinary degree of activity. Tell him your age, and ask him how many seconds it is, and he will tell you in a very few minutes. In all other respects, he is an idiot.”

And Howe’s Case 25: “This young man knows the name and sound of every letter, he can put the letters into words, the words into sentences, and read off a page with correctness; but he would read over that page a thousand times, without getting the slightest idea of the meaning.”

Howe went on to list more examples that hint at autism, though with less detail. “What they learn, they never forget,” he reported, of one particular group. Also: “There are cases, Nos. 175 and 192, idiots beyond all question, but who can count not only to 20, but to 20,000, and perform many simple arithmetical operations with a great deal more facility than ordinary persons.” There is Case 277, a girl who can “learn and know letters” but can understand nothing to which they relate.

Howe’s research took place during a period when the majority of “ordinary persons” in the United States were illiterate, with little experience of using the alphabet at all. Neither did most Americans have much exposure to math, beyond counting what was in front of their noses: farm animals, rows of crops, family members. Twenty was a number beyond which few had much occasion to go visiting in their imaginations. The “idiots” were, by comparison, intellectual voyagers, at least in this narrow respect.

Howe was ridiculed yet again when he presented his report to the
legislature. For his idealism, he was compared to Don Quixote, tilting at windmills. He prevailed, however, where it counted—with the lawmakers, who came up with $2,500 to fund an experimental school for ten of the children in the survey, with Howe in charge. Three years later, each of the children, previously thought uneducable, had made progress. Howe was thrilled. His report had fulfilled his ambitions in his own time, even as it tucked away something more relevant to our own—his eyewitness accounts of what autism looked like, ninety years before it was “discovered” in a psychiatrist’s office in Baltimore.

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I
F
K
ANNER WAS RIGHT
, and autism had always existed, then these stories from the past hint at some unpleasant life experiences for those who, during autism’s prehistory, went through their days undiagnosed. If, in the seventeenth century, they were still burning and hanging epileptics as witches—due to their occasional fits of strange movements and sounds—that would not have boded well for a child who tonelessly parroted back whatever was said to him, or whose deep concentration on the movement of his own fingers before his eyes could not be interrupted. If mutism was confused with lunacy, then quite likely nonspeaking people with autism would have been candidates for Europe’s various institutions, which included a tower in the city wall of Hamburg, where the insane were confined to a space known as
the Idiot’s Cage.

Samuel Gridley Howe saw a great deal of dehumanizing of the disabled on his tour of Massachusetts towns. He found parents mired in “gross ignorance” of their children’s capabilities. One family kept their middle-aged son in a cage in the parents’ shop. He had been there since the age of twelve. Another man, age fifty, had been chained up for twenty years.

Such outcomes were not inevitable, however. In the eighteenth century, a town of rural Scotsmen proved that through their acceptance of Hugh Blair. So, in the twentieth century, did the people of a small Mississippi town, through the way they responded to the odd child in their midst—Donald Triplett.

5

DOUBLY LOVED AND PROTECTED

I
n May 1945, Leo Kanner traveled to Mississippi to see, for the last time, his Case 1, who was eleven years old by this time. For a few days, Dr. Kanner would be a guest of the Triplett family.

It had been four years since Donald’s last visit to Kanner’s clinic in Baltimore, and seven years since his first visit. Now, sitting on the white sofas in the Triplett living room, near the baby grand piano Mary and Beamon had splurged on, the three had time to ruminate on the ups and downs of Donald’s past few years, including Mary’s attempts to get him to go to school.

In the late summer of 1939, when Donald was about to turn six, Mary had approached the public elementary school with the hope of enrolling him in the first-grade class starting that September. She knew what she was asking. Schools all over the country were flatly refusing children like Donald, and the law backed them up. True, there were special-education classrooms in some public school districts, whose availability varied by region, but even in these, children who did not sit quietly and follow directions readily were quickly expelled. However, in this case the school principal was a friend of Mary’s. A space was found for Donald, and the first-grade teacher was made to understand that she would have to accommodate this somewhat different child.

On the first day, Donald threw tantrums. He was a little calmer the second day, and even more so in the days that followed. Given no choice but to adapt to Donald, his teacher apparently made efforts to accommodate his peculiar ways. Perhaps this meant ignoring or redirecting odd behavior rather than punishing it. Or maybe it
meant finding ways to give Donald a little extra attention to help him keep up.

It seems Donald began to adapt as well. A lot of his odd behaviors, to be sure, remained, and were doubtlessly disruptive. In the first few weeks, he randomly broke out in squeals and shrieks, and when he was answering a question addressed to him directly, he sometimes jumped up and down after giving his answer, giving his head a hard shake. But at least he answered questions from time to time. By October, he could keep his place in line, answer politely when called upon in class, and follow along better with the flow of the learning day. In the evenings, he never had anything to say about what he was doing at school, but he put up no resistance to returning there in the morning. For a child with a phobia about changes to his environment, this was progress.

His use of language improved as well. While he had learned to read words aloud earlier than the other children, it appeared he had no idea of the meaning of those words. It was the same with movies. He enjoyed going to them and would recite lines of dialogue for weeks afterward, but he seemed not to understand that the characters on the screen were telling a story. After having been enrolled in school, these deficits showed signs of being corrected.

One day, during his third month in school, on a visit to the classroom, Mary was amazed to see Donald fully engaged in a reading lesson. The teacher had just written a series of sentences on the chalkboard and was explaining to the class that she would be calling on each child one at a time to step forward, find the sentence in which his or her name appeared, circle the name, and then act out the sentence. Mary saw the teacher write the sentence with her son’s name: “Don may feed a fish.” When it was his turn, she watched Donald stand up, accept the chalk, draw a chalk circle around “Don,” and then go over to the side table where the class aquarium sat and sprinkle some fish food into the water. Donald had done it—he had made sense of both the spoken and the written word—without fuss. To Mary, his performance was so momentous that, when she got home, she immediately wrote a letter to Kanner, describing the entire scene for him.

Without a doubt, Donald still lagged behind the other first-graders, but it was obvious that he was steadily changing, growing,
and discovering how to connect. Kanner had seen this happening during the family’s first follow-up trip to Baltimore, in May 1939, seven months after their initial consultation and a few months before the school experiment started. Writing up his observations from that time, Kanner reported that Donald’s attention and concentration were showing improvement, that he was in better contact with his environment, and that he was reacting much more appropriately to people and situations. “He showed disappointment when thwarted,” Kanner observed, and “gave evidence of pleasure when praised.” At the same time, there was a big part of Donald’s world that remained out of reach. “He still went on writing letters with his fingers in the air,” Kanner noted.

The first-grade experiment proceeded past Christmas and into winter. By spring, Donald’s use of language had developed even further. At home, he began engaging in a rough approximation of conversation. Mary would ask specific questions about his day, and he would readily answer. But his responses were narrow and concrete; he never opened up about his thoughts and experiences. He did, however, insist one night on making the entire family play a game he had just learned at school. They all went along with it, following his exceedingly precise instructions. Both Mary and Beamon understood how remarkable it was that Donald was entering into a game at all. This was a first in his life—playing with other children.