Only later does he reveal his motivation in including these sketches: to comfort those diagnosed in the present with the knowledge that similar characteristics have been present in great figures of the past. Might they have been autistic? The author wants us to think so, but it’s impossible to tell. And then a similar sketch of Dirac in the 20th century: he didn’t talk much either. The reader of Steve Silberman’s brilliant and sparklingly humane book, the winner of this year’s Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction, might well be alarmed early on when, after an introduction on the modern politics of autism, he settles into a long biographical portrait of the 18th-century scientist Henry Cavendish, whom his contemporaries thought very odd and shy. And if diagnosis at a distance is irresponsible when practised on modern celebrities, it is, arguably, hardly more respectable when the distance is the yet more unbridgeable one of time. Did the biblical Goliath have the growth disorder acromegaly? Was Henry VIII a psychopath? Was the great physicist Paul Dirac autistic? The truth is we can’t know. I t’s a fun parlour game to diagnose figures from the past with illnesses recognised by modern science.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |