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1. History of Dyslexia Part 1: Brain Injury · Learn Literacy Podcast

• Cheryl Urbanczyk: Hello everyone and welcome to this episode of the Learn Literacy podcast where we support the cause of language for life by teaching literacy through language and structure. Today is the first episode in our History of Dyslexia series so ⁓ way I'm approaching this ⁓ ⁓ to do little snippets ⁓ historical information about dyslexia from, maybe late 1800s, working slowly slowly up into the future. And the reason I'm doing this is that there's a lot of very interesting historical information that sheds a light on where we are now, and helps us understand how we got to be where we are. So, obviously, there's some things from the past that are more historical artifacts of interest as opposed to ⁓ truths that still carry forward. But some of the ideas and things they thought about were their genuine attempts to try to figure out why kids weren't learning how to read and how to move forward and support that. given some of the instrumentation of the time, they were able to figure out quite a bit. You know, we often think that, in our modern scientific age, if we don't have the most advanced equipment, we can't, deduce or figure things out. but there's actually a lot of interesting things they were able to ⁓ ascertain and learn about. So, without further ado, we're just jumping in and we are starting in the late ⁓ 1800s, starting in the year ⁓ with William Broadbent, who is a physician. And he saw ⁓ patients who had ⁓ suffered ⁓ damage and they had what he called aphasia characteristics. So to understand what an aphasia is, we need to go over the definition of that term so we can all understand what it is. So aphasia is spelled A-P-H-A-S-I-A. And so if we think about the graphemes in that word, we might recognize right away, ⁓ we have that P-H representing that sound. and that might clue us in that we have a word of Greek origin because that pH representing the phoneme is good sign that we might have a word from Greek. ⁓ when look at dictionary.com, we get the definition of an aphasia ⁓ as impairment of a previously held ability to produce or understand speech. spoken written sign language or due to disease or injury of the brain. So when we look at EdomOnline, we get a very similar definition that it's the loss of the ability to speak, especially as a result of brain injury or disorder. And that term is dated in EdomOnline from 1867. And he, know, that where history is traced from Latin to Greek in Greek it's speechlessness, okay, or without speech. So when Broadbent was getting patients referred to him, he detailed 10 patients who had lost the ability to speak due to brain damage. But one interesting thing he found was two out of the 10 cases were people who lost the ability to read as a result of brain damage. So what he found in these two cases is that speech was intact, but they were not able to read books. So it was ⁓ kind of an interesting case and they had lost this skill after brain injury. So we don't know much more about his work than that, ⁓ he's one of the first ⁓ ⁓ I able to find or that's in some of the literature as someone who noted the ability to read was lost after brain damage. And so we're going to keep that in mind because the people who then look at children who don't have the ability to read really reference some of these ⁓ who are looking at adults who lost the ability to read as brain injury. Okay, forward about five years to 1877, we have Adolf Kussma, who was a German physician, ⁓ he wrote a book called Disturbances of Speech. So he was doing the same thing ⁓ as broadband. would ⁓ have people referred to him who had injury to the brain and then loss of various functions. So I have an from his book that we will read as a direct quote. medical literature, we find cases recorded as aphasia, which could, which should not be properly designated by this name, since the patients were still able to express their thoughts by speech and writing. ⁓ they not lost the power either speaking or writing. They were no longer able, however, although the hearing was perfect to understand the words which they heard, or meaning a second case, the site was perfect. They were not able to read the written words, which they saw. so he's that I'm jumping a couple of sentences ⁓ and that calling this inability either word deafness, meaning not able to hear the words or word blindness, not ⁓ being able see words. ⁓ So what he found in these situations was that speech was intact, which is why he's saying we can't call it an aphasia because that term refers to speechlessness, but we need a different term for it. So that he actually coined the term then word blindness and the vision of these people was fine, but the issue was not being able to read words or to read. So, he goes on to talk about how, some of these things like word blindness or word deafness occur with other after effects of injury and ⁓ that there some levels of being able to read or not read in ⁓ the different patients he saw that, was a puzzling situation for him, right? And that as these early documents show, ⁓ are trying to figure this out, that the brain injury caused certain ⁓ to happen, but they showed up either on a spectrum, from mild to severe, or showed up different ways with different people. And, he's saying as well, that some people lost the ability to read numbers and music. And this is going to be something we're going to keep in our mind moving forward because in many of the people working with children, they didn't just look at the ability to read words. They also looked at the ability to read numbers and musical notes. So the musical notes piece might, I find very interesting today because, learning to read music maybe is not as common as it was back then or considered as a thing ⁓ learned do but guess they saw the reading of any type of material whether it's numbers or music as an important thing to assess right like where did it manifest words numbers musical notes they wanted to figure that all out okay He also stressed in his work that these people had ability to read beforehand. ⁓ So wasn't a problem of lack of or a vision issue that in the patient and so forth, they were successful readers and they were able to learn to read successfully. So was no problem at the beginning parts of the reading process, right? and that for whatever reason due to brain injury, they lost some part or all of the ability to read. So, he coined this term word blindness to describe this phenomena, ⁓ The inability read words, the speech of the person was intact, which is why he didn't want to call it aphasia, and the intellect was intact of the person as well as the vision. So, word blindness actually stuck as a term for quite some time. And as we go through our little episodes of history, we'll see how and where that word was used and when it was actually like phased out as a term. But he coined this term word blindness. Moving forward few more years to 1883, we have Dr. Rudolf Berlin, who was a German physician, and he was actually the first to introduce the term dyslexia. So if we look at what the term dyslexia means from etymological point of view, the prefix means like bad or wrong or difficult. The L-E-X part or lex means word. And it's the same base that we see ⁓ like lexile level for reading or the lexicon is the ⁓ number words people have in their brain, for example. Sometimes it's used synonymously with reading, it does have this idea of word attached to it. And then the final piece of the word is like an IA, it's a suffix ⁓ to that ⁓ a So ⁓ when have dyslexia, why did he choose this term? ⁓ we another physician who is looking at the very same type of condition of brain damage resulting in loss of some capacity or faculties as a result of that, whether it's from sickness or injury, it didn't really matter. They were just kind of looking to see, okay, what was the after effects of that? So he noticed that the reading problems occurred after brain damage ⁓ and he developed a clinical profile for this. So whereas the other doctors documented cases and things, Berlin ⁓ had a profile in the sense that, he wrote cause effect, this type of thing, and he called it dyslexia. ⁓ So why dyslexia? He felt it a better term because the word alexia was also already part of the medical vernacular of the time. ⁓ alexia was, the ability to not read at all. So, he figured dyslexia was a good word because the people could read at one time, but then they could not read after the brain injury. So, ⁓ His work is interesting because he does refer to word blindness and he considers this dyslexia a form of word blindness, but at least to me it was unclear how He considered that on the scale of what word blindness is right so we have word blindness as a concept He has dyslexia as a concept. He considers dyslexia a form of word blindness but I'm unclear on how they are different. thought they were just, dyslexia was a milder form of word blindness. So to I couldn't work through that and figure it out. So it's very interesting. made the same note that these people had successfully acquired literacy skills ⁓ before the brain damage. that, so again, we're out things like intellect, vision problems, effort, any of these things because they were illiterate people before to the brain. So what he did is he actually did ⁓ observations on brains and he to where to find ⁓ the lesions or the damage in the brain. ⁓ So lesion is a damaged brain area and he found them pretty consistently on the left hemisphere. So again, we're planting a seed of something we'll come back to moving forward that the left hemisphere ⁓ where our brain its reading process. ⁓ so on what we know now, it makes sense that he would find in these lesions in the left-hand side of the brain. ⁓ But back in the day, doing autopsy in your lab and seeing these lesions on the left-hand side, was just a note that he had. So we've reviewed three different medical doctors. We've looked at broadband who first looked at cases of brain damage and documented the loss of reading. We looked at Kussma who also did the same thing, but he called this concept this phenomena word blindness. He coined the term for that. So Broadbent didn't have a name for it, but he just documented this thing was happening. Then we talked about Berlin, who did ⁓ the type of documentation. He coined the term dyslexia and he actually did brain analysis and autopsies and things. ⁓ Okay, so our takeaway from these three doctors who started looking at ⁓ the inability read? I can't stress enough that they allowed us to rule out the inability to read due to intellect, vision issues, speech issues, effort, any of things, because these people had the ability to read. Berlin especially did examine brains to see where the damage was in the brain and then concluded that the left hemisphere is a place that is connected to reading. and that this condition was acquired, meaning that you weren't born with it, that there was some situation that happened. Again, it doesn't really matter what it is. Illness, infection, injury, something happened in your brain that to the loss of the ability to read. So ⁓ we're to keep all these things in mind. And when we... go to our next session, history of dyslexia part two, ⁓ going to then look at children and transition to that phase of history where we start to see documentation of who do not have the ability to read and then we'll link that thinking around them to the work done by these doctors. So thank you listening. ⁓ you're interested in learning how to support students with dyslexia, please go to my website, learnliteracy.com and you can review the various Orton Gillingham trainings, structured literacy trainings, and other things that I do that ⁓ interest you if you're on a journey to learn how to support children learning how to read. thank you. And until next time, ⁓ please up your excitement ⁓ teaching children how to read, supporting them, advocating literacy for life, and teaching language through literacy and structure. Thank you.