How do you think you'd have lived with AS in past centuries?

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I just thought about this today. I've heard one or another claim that various historical personalities might have been AS, but I know it's impossible to make a diagnosis of anyone that way.

What I'm interested in is...bearing in mind that it didn't have a name till the 20th century, and didn't come to most people's notice till even more recently...how would people have treated someone with AS in the past, do you reckon?

Two things. First off, the Aspie tendency to need routine and follow rules...do you think the social customs of earlier times, when things were more formal, would have helped someone who was Aspergers to cope with everyday life? Or would they actually have made things more difficult, by making anyone who didn't 'fit in' that much more obvious?

Secondly, the effects of education. I think that if you were AS in the 19C, for example, and you came from a well-off family and ended up at Oxford or Cambridge, it would have been relatively easy to pass much of your life just being regarded as 'eccentric'. I can imagine that a few of those Victorian clergymen - the ones who had lots of spare time on their hands, so ended up becoming keen naturalists and tramping through the countryside collecting birds' eggs and cataloguing rare newts, or whatever - might have fitted the Asperger personality. On the other hand, I suspect that if you were in the lower social echelons, or you were a woman (same thing in many periods of history!), there would have been a lot more pressure to be 'normal', and you'd end up in some pretty nasty situations if you couldn't conform.

Any thoughts, anyone? If you'd lived in some past period in history, with the AS traits you have, what do you think might have happened to you?

Well, the biggest AS names in history that come to my mind are Albert Einstein and Emily Dickens.

So the Time Magazine declared Greatest Mind of the Milenniumm and one of the best 19th century poets to date having AS, I guess we wouldn't have done too badly. It would just depend on the way you handled each situation.

I think they would of burned me for being a witch, apart from not be like others, I also have 2 different colored eyes...

I was going to say that; I would have been burnt at the stake!

I think I would have been drowned in holy water!

They might have had an easier time than today. You could afford to be good at one thing and call it a day. Would a butcher, baker or candlestick maker have stood out if all he talked about was butchering, baking or candlestick making?

We can't really lump all of previous history into one category... but I could have been the village idiot in some times and places. I think I would have liked Confucian China if I came from a scholar-gentry family, though.

AS life in the past tense topic

If a member of the middle class I would have been an eccentric recluse, reading and writing, if lucky.

If I had been poor, I would have been some sort of servant, working alone. If I was able to read and write, I would have read and written in any spare time.

There would have been no marriage or children. Higher education would have been out of the question. I would also be non-social.

Clicking on this topic, I already had my mind made up to add "be burnt alive at the stake", and I see it's already been written twice??! !

Great minds DO think alike!

Clock-maker, black/white/silver-smith, scribe?... printer? pipe-organ maintainer? Alchemist?? (I don't know enough history to give a real serious answer, here.)

How about crazy uncle who is related to royalty and inherits some outlying castle/land to become an eccentric baron. Maybe I could've invented golf or something. (Actually, I'd probably have been playing with static electricity or prisms all day long.) ...Wouldn't have to be "normal" for anybody, people to keep me fed, clothed, and picked-up after, to keep my place clean and tidy... oh yes!

...Or, a troll living under a bridge subsisting on bugs and carrion...

I'd probably have been a mad alchemist, sitting in a wooden hut and playing with chemicals all day long. Perhaps I might have discovered how to turn lead into gold, or more likely, how to turn a solid-oak hut into a smouldering wreck.

Another possibility is that I would have been a poet. Staring at trees all day and writing about them in rhythmical, pretentious verse doesn't appeal to me much, but it would be a lot better than a lot of careers that were on offer back in the olden days.

I probably would have died young due to lack of medication for my seizure disorder.

I will here post one of my favorite Ellen DeGeneres quote:


"Our attention span is shot. We've all got Attention Deficit Disorder or ADD or OCD or one of these disorders with three letters because we don't have the time or patience to pronounce the entire disorder. That should be a disorder right there, TBD - Too Busy Disorder. What's with this sudden choice of disorders we get right now? When I was a kid, we just had crazy people. That's it, just crazy people."