![]() ![]() Mary in particular resisted this dictate, although the Tripletts did briefly place their son in a facility called the Preventorium before thinking better of it and seeking out Kanner. Every doctor his parents consulted insisted that the boy was hopelessly insane and should be institutionalized so that the Triplett family could get on with their lives. His mother, Mary, worried that Donald’s habit of running out into the street would, during some brief moment when her attention lapsed, get him killed. (He would endlessly repeat the words chrysanthemum, business, and trumpet vine for no discernible reason.) He mostly ignored the people around him-unless he was throwing violent tantrums when aspects of his environment or routine were changed. Triplett, the scion of a leading family in a small Mississippi town, could speak, but what he said made little sense to his parents. It was Kanner who, in the 1940s, identified autism as a condition distinct from both “mental retardation” and schizophrenia, with which it had long been confused. In a Different Key begins and ends with one man: Donald Triplett, the first person diagnosed with autism by Leo Kanner, an American child psychiatrist. ![]()
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