Donald Gray “Don” Triplett, the first person to be formally diagnosed with autism, died Thursday after an illness.
A Mississippi native, Triplett was the first subject (“Case 1”) of Austrian-American psychiatrist Leo Kanner’s influential 1943 paper, “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact.” Triplett’s parents had brought him to Kanner’s clinic at Johns Hopkins University for observation when Triplett was just five-years-old.
In the paper, Triplett was described as a child who “could hum and sing many tunes accurately” and possessed “an unusual memory for faces and names” before the age of two.