To the people of Forest, Mississippi, he was just Don. Too clever for his own good. A genius, they reckoned. Sure, he was different, but he was happy. And they looked out for him
But if his words could be brilliant his meaning was often opaque. When he said “you” he meant “me”. When he said “yes” it meant “pick me up and put me on your shoulders.” When someone stood on his toy he said “umbrella”. And what he meant by “chrysanthemum” was anybody’s guess. He had other idiosyncrasies, too. He shook his head, constantly, from side to side. He gave people numbers, not just names. And if his toys weren’t just so, he screamed till the muscles stood out on his neck.
An earlier doctor, near her home in Forest, Mississippi, had been far less cautious. He had known exactly what was wrong with Mary’s boy: it was Mary. She had overstimulated him, with all her songs and all that talking. He knew how to cure him, too: Mary must put Donald in an institution, away from her. So she and her husband put their boy in the family Buick and drove him to a children’s institution in a town called Sanatorium. Then they left him there.
Kanner started work on a paper. He would include ten other children in it too but Donald would be his first: “Case 1”. Many of these children had wildly different characteristics, he wrote. However they all shared one thing: an “inability to relate themselves in the ordinary way to people”. Common English had no word for this, so Kanner borrowed a word for it from elsewhere in psychiatry. The word he chose came from a Greek word, “autos”, which meant “self”. Donald, he wrote, was “autistic”.
And he was happy. He still gave numbers to people, too. Pastor Mark was 472. His friend Celeste was 1,315. Olivia and Toby were 154 and 155.
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