ABSTRACT
All medical histories are unfinished in the sense that ongoing research revises what we know about the body and mind, but it is fair to say that this is more the case with autism than with other conditions. As this section has shown, much of the history of the condition has been recent, and we should be aware when we talk about autism that we are very much in the formative historical stages; it is very likely, for example, that the singular category of ‘autism’ will not be able to hold all the different variants of the condition that will be come to be understood, and old categories may well be superseded by new. There is speculation that Asperger’s Syndrome might be removed from DSM-V because of 73new ideas surrounding the proper description of the condition. All the research, scholarship, arguments, and opinions being produced now may well look very strange when viewed from the perspective of hundreds of years in the future. The history of autism at that point may see our thoughts and interventions as the actions of those stumbling in the dark.
