Mitzi Waltz, Autism

Mitzi Waltz's Autism: A Social and Medical History explores formulations of autism across time and reconstructs historical experiences of people labelled with autism. The tale of autism's construction as a modern disease has been told before, but Waltz's contribution to this conversation is substantial: Waltz's engaging writing style and detailed biographical sketches make the story of autism real and readable for both academic and non-academic audiences. The book is primarily organised chronologically. Chapter 2 addresses autism ‘before and after the Enlightenment’ by glossing over interesting titbits with relevance to the history of western medicine and psychiatry. Chapter 3 describes how disability was constructed during the Victorian era by charting the rise of institutionalisation of the poor, the professionalisation of medicine/psychiatry, and the expansion of clinical diagnoses. This chapter culminates in a novel discussion of the role of institutionalisation in confounding experts' abilities to distinguish between organic and non-organic aspects of autism

Art · Art history · Autism · Conversation · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Institutionalisation · Literature · Political science · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Relevance (law · Sociology · Style (visual arts · Waltz · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · History of Medical Practice · History of Science and Medicine · Psychology · History · Law · Philosophy