How Down Syndrome got its name. In the 1860′s, Dr. John Langdon Down published a paper describing a certain subset of his patients at the Royal Earlswood Asylum for Idiots (as it was called at that time). He described these patients as: The Mongolian type of idiocy occurs in more than ten per cent of the cases which are presented to me. They are always congenital idiots and never result from accidents after uterine life. They are, for the most part instances of degeneracy arising from tuberculosis in the parents. They have considerable power of imitation, even bordering on being mimics. They are humorous and a lively sense of the ridiculous often colours their mimicry. This faculty of imitation can be cultivated to a very great extent and a practical direction given to the results obtained. They are usually able to speak; the speech is thick and indistinct, but may be improved very greatly by a well directed scheme of tongue gymnastics. The co-ordinating faculty is abnormal, but not so defective that it cannot be strengthened. By systemic training, considerable manipulative power may be obtained. In that era when Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution were new, Dr. Down theorized that these patients were a “regression” in the evolution of man. Because their physical appearance reminded Dr. Down of people from Mongolia, he termed the condition “Mongolian idiocy.” The condition was known by this name, or shortened to referring to the individuals with the condition as “Mongoloids.” In 1961, the medical journal Lancet ran a letter from noted geneticists calling for a re-naming of the condition: It has long been recognised that the terms ‘Mongolian Idiocy’, ‘Mongolism’, ‘Mongoloid’, etc as applied to a specific type of mental deficiency have misleading connotations. The importance of this anomaly among Europeans and their descendants is not related to the segregation of genes derived from Asians; its appearance among members of Asian populations suggests such ambiguous designations as ‘Mongol Mongoloid’; increasing participation of Chinese and Japanese in investigation of the condition imposes on them the use of an embarrassing term. We urge, therefore, that the expressions which imply a racial aspect of the condition be no longer used. Some of the undersigned are inclined to replace the term Mongolism by such designations as ‘Langdon Down Anomaly’, or ‘Down’s Syndrome or Anomaly’, or ‘Congenital Acromicria’. Several of us believe that this is an appropriate time to introduce the term ‘Trisomy 21 Anomaly’, which would include cases of simple Trisomy as well as translocations. It is hoped that agreement on a specific phrase will soon crystallise once the term ‘Mongolism’ has been abandoned. The editor selected “Down’s syndrome” and the World Health Organization confirmed that description for the condition in 1965. And, that is how “mongolian idiocy” became known as “Down syndrome.”
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 00:24:39 +0000
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