William Pringle Morgan

Plaque to the memory of this Seaford doctor who was the first to identify dyslexia. He called it congenital word blindness, but the theory now seems to favour "phonological" problems.

"Underlying causes of developmental dyslexia:
Two main proximal causes have been considered. Historically, the initial hypothesis was that of a visual deficit (“congenital word blindness”, coined by William Pringle-Morgan in 1896). In the 1970s, it became evident that what had been interpreted as visual letter confusions were better explained by phonological confusions. Over the last three decades it has been well established that most cases of dyslexia can be attributed to a subtle disorder of oral language (the “phonological deficit”), whose symptoms happen to surface most prominently in reading acquisition. It remains likely that a minority of cases of dyslexia are due to disorders in the visual modality, although the precise nature of the deficit remains unclear.