Isaac Newton was Autistic or Not A cottage industry has developed around placing long-dead geniuses at various points on the Asperger’s spectrum. Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein are the most frequent victims of this particular form of retrospective diagnosis. Recently and without any apparent reason, the Orange Country Register joined the fun with the article […]
Tag: Retrodiagnosis
Zimmerman and University of Manchester professor Rosalie David, who founded the university’s renowned Egypt Mummy Project, wrote a 2010 paper for the journal Nature on the lack of mummified cancer and their speculation that cancer might be more tied to modern environments than has been assumed. Zimmerman attributes most of the difference to the modern […]
Teaching a course on plagues and epidemics in history makes me more aware than normal of press reports about some group of scientists trying to retro-diagnose some historical plague or epidemic (Find a description of this course and a link to the syllabus on my Recent Courses page). There seems to have been a rash […]