This is a good point.
Until a few decades ago, people with disabilities were segregated from the rest of the population to a far greater extent than is true today. So unless there was someone with a particular disability in your family, you tended not to see such people. They were invisible, and therefore it was easy to assume that they were rare.
When my children were diagnosed with asthma, my physician father really couldn’t believe it since, “no one in my family or your mother’s family, ever had asthma.” Basically he just didn’t believe the diagnosis. Then the great aunts (on both sides) heard about it, started talking, and the family history became a lot more complicated. The kids with asthma, in his generation and earlier, hadn’t survived early childhood. We could count them up in the family cemetery. I am extremely grateful for modern drugs. My father started going to sessions at medical conferences and became very well educated in the disease. And he started a very productive conversation with an MD family friend of my generation whose young kids also had asthma. As a result, for a while, I was way ahead of the local pediatricians in knowledge of early childhood treatment options. A couple of times they directed other parents in the practice to call me for information. 
I do wonder about passing on the genes.
We have no severe autism in our family. We have at least four generations of “on the spectrum” behaviors. We have at least one, usually a couple or more, (depending how many individuals there are per generation) family members in each of those generations, never able to take care of themselves as adults and always needing a whole lot of family help and support. There are other, usually relatively minor, mental health issues with those individuals as well, which tend to become more serious with age. I am waiting to see which relatives in my generation end up unable to leave home and pointing a gun at anyone who ventures up the driveway. I have my eye on a couple of folks. However, this generation is the first on drugs so maybe I’ll be proven wrong. … crossing fingers.
When husband and I read the first articles about Aspergers in the NYTimes, we looked at each other and wondered if we knew a single child, on either side of our families, not fitting that definition. Not really. That was our norm. Some of them you wouldn’t guess it now. They seem pretty normal by societal standards. If normal even exists.
I’m predisposed to really enjoy quirky kids.
eta: I am so sorry for all of you dealing with autism. I am holding my breath with regard to my grandchildren and don’t mean to make light of this.
I have asthma. Scared my sister half to death sharing a room. I’m very allergic to oine, so when I went to summer camp I’d invariably end up at the er.
It wasn’t until I visited hubby’s family and talked about my asthma did they connect the dots with past generations. Hubby’s grandma said she always hated Christmas because her mom was always so sick and couldn’t breathe well and it wasn’t until me they put the pieces together that she must also have had asthma and been allergic to pine…or the mold on the pine.
My younger sister had severe asthma as a child. I remember sitting in the hospital hallway several times while they got her into an oxygen tent. (Scared me half to death, too.) We didn’t live in an area with risk factors for asthma, but the room with oxygen tents always seems occupied by several kids, and that was in the 70s. Now, her asthma is under control, though she developed or discovered a severe peanut allergy in college.
Peanut butter is one of the asthma triggers for my son. DH’s family has a history of asthma.
I never knew anyone as a kid with asthma. I was in Japan and then East Africa for a good part of my childhood. Here in NYC one of the big culprits is apparently cockroaches. I’ve also read that keeping things too clean seems to contribute to allergies. I like to think the reason my kids have no allergies is because they lived in the sandbox when they were little and I never bought into the disinfectant/anti-bacterial thing except for my toilet. There’s been some research on peanut allergies apparently we should be introducing peanuts into the diet much earlier. http://health.usnews.com/health-news/patient-advice/articles/2015/07/30/peanut-allergy-prevention-introduce-infants-early-and-often
OTOH, my oldest has (very mild) Tourettes and could be on the spectrum. We just see him as a bit quirky and one-sided. There’s definitely some of that on both sides of the family.
ynotgo I know a person with severe tree nut allergies. they had a reaction (beyond words) it was fast and scary and had an ambulance not gotten to them and the ER was any further it would have been horrible.nut allergies are no joke!
My sister’s peanut allergy fits the “we should be introducing peanuts earlier” theory. She probably never had peanuts until college. She does carry an EpiPen and has used it. (Some salad dressing–not Asian–at the Cheesecake Factory was the most recent culprit a few years ago.) I stole cashews from my dad’s “secret” stash, which probably had peanut oil that was likely the only peanuts in the house growing up.
My theory (with no real basis that I’ve read) is that there are histamine priming events that occur to people and that for some time after that event, a person is prone to develop allergies to substances that are new to their system. My anecdote is that I developed a fairly serious allergy to coconut butter shortly after having a hives reaction to a lab chemical. Also, after I get an ant bite, my reactions to mosquito bites that would normally not be noticed much are more significant for several weeks.
My mom has Graves which is a thyroid disease with a known hereditary component. We thought she was the first until we talked to an older family member who remembered other family members having the characteristic eye issues before passing away. Of course, no one was diagnosed because they couldn’t afford doctors.
I’m currently going through rounds of testing to better confirm my doctors’ suspicion of Lupus. Lupus is a disease that’s becoming more common because we’re surviving and doctors aren’t just dismissing the pain and fatigue.
I lived in a sandbox and my parents worked too much to keep our house spotless and disinfected. We always had pets and I spent a lot of time on a farm. Yet, I still have severe allergies and moderate asthma.
I reiterate, these diseases are not new. We’re just better at diagnosing and surviving them and we’re talking about them more openly.
I’ve said before, I work with thousands of patient records from the early to mid 20th C. Autism is not new, we just now call it Autism rather than retardation or other even less palatable names. I also know that many of these patients were left at the institutions and their families basically pretended they never existed.
There is a project going on right now on a local mental hospital’s graveyard to identify the hundreds of graves marked only by numbers. These people’s families never claimed them in death and their descendants probably don’t even know that they had an aunt or great uncle locked away and written out of family history.
Annie’s Ghost is a great book about one journalist’s journey into his family history. He found out about an aunt he never knew about (institutionalized in the hospital mentioned above).
Individuals were institutionalized, sometimes with the stated goal of protecting the other children in the family and sometimes the other children were never even told about their siblings. Families really did hide it. They thought that was for the best.
To be clear- and I do apologize if I come off as any other way- alh is right. Families often thought they were doing the best thing possible for their children (both the affected and “normal” children) by institutionalizing them. We simply didn’t know then what we know now and many of them actually did live better lives in the institutions than they would have in their families. Especially with families who were very poor.
Pretending the children didn’t exist was often a coping mechanism.
romani - Do those sorts of institutions even exist any more?
Not really, not in the US. There are some long-term care facilities but they’re hard to get into, expensive, and are generally only for those who are severely disabled.
Well, actually that’s not entirely true. We do have facilities where we house the mentally ill and those with cognitive disabilities but we now call them prisons.
Yes. That is what has happened. Prison.
It is difficult to imagine these institutions when they no longer exist. Middle and upper middle class families in my suburban childhood usually arranged for their very severely disabled children to be raised in that kind of institution. This isn’t even an option these days as far as I know. We expect families to do it all by themselves.
adding: I think your research is really important. This thread shows just one reason why. We have no cultural memory of these things.
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ynotgo I know a person with severe tree nut allergies. they had a reaction (beyond words) it was fast and scary and had an ambulance not gotten to them and the ER was any further it would have been horrible.nut allergies are no joke!
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Definitely real. My BIL does have a fast and scary reaction to tree nuts and peanuts (which aren’t tree nuts, but he has a similar reaction). He’s very careful, but one time “messed up” at a potluck. He does carry an epi pen.
But again, when I was growing up in the 60s, I didn’t know anyone, my H didn’t know anyone, my siblings didn’t know anyone with peanut allergies…yet now there are 2-3 in every class. WHY?
If I recall my history, peanuts didn’t become popular until the 1920’s when George Washington Carver developed uses for them to give farmers options other than cotton. I don’t think peanut butter became popular as it is until maybe the 50’s or 60’s. Now we use peanuts continually including peanut oil etc because it is affordable. Maybe it took a generation for the sensitivity to develop, maybe it is just the overabundance of it triggering allergies. Perhaps our great-grandparents didn’t have these allergies, because it wasn’t part of their lifestyle.
Reflecting on what Romani was saying about autism in past generations, there was a huge difference in childhood mortality and certainly infant mortality. Perhaps some subset of babies born with autism would not have survived those days, certainly not the premies. It is amazing what modern medicine has done for childhood survival, and the diseases we have eradicated.
I have read articles regarding the parasite causing Toxoplasmosis and it’s relationship to some cases of autism, and I find it plausible. Once one is exposed to toxoplasmosis, it stays in your body for life, and an enormous quantity of the population have been exposed. They have found a link in some cases that they have studied, and I’m curious to see if there is more research on this link.
Often, children with weaker immune systems died in early childhood… even in the 60s. Those with peanut allergies often have other immune problems (diagnosed or not).
There probably is an increase, for a variety of reasons, but people really shouldn’t let their memories determine whether or not a disease was prevalent in one’s childhood. For one, our memories are notoriously unreliable. For two, again, children who had illnesses often died young or were otherwise segregated from society.
Just today I was talking to my mom about an appointment I have with the gastroenterologist in the morning. I told them on the phone that no one in my family had ever had ulcers or other colitis issues. My mom told me that her mom did and the doctors back then attributed it to stress. So, even for someone who specializes in the history of medicine- and thus am naturally curious about my own family’s medical history- I don’t know the whole story.
Not only are these disorders, autism, allergies or others, being diagnosed more frequently now, milder cases are being identified. Severe cases are easy to diagnose, but the milder cases, not so much, especially in children.
Couple of things about allergies. The branch of the immune system responsible for handling parasites is the one involved in allergies. Interestingly, allergies don’t seem to happen in places with parasites where that immune system has something to do. And as far as peanut allergies go, yes there are more of them. I think it would have been challenging to keep a kid with a peanut allergy alive till adulthood in an era when we ate factory-made poorly-labelled foods and didn’t carry epi pens. My cousin knew someone who made it to college. She did not survive to graduation. I also think because of the risk of anaphylaxis, there are probably a fair number of people with mild nut allergies who are lumped in with the severe ones, because who wants to take the risk that the next reaction will be worse? And finally, there used to be a theory that you shouldn’t expose infants at risk of allergies to potential allergens till they were older. I wouldn’t be surprised if we have more nut allergies among millennials as a result.
Re asthma - my dad (73) has it, and his entire family always had “weak lungs” which I think today would likely be diagnosed as asthma. He has a brother who we all think is mildly mentally retarded, but they just didn’t have the diagnosis and support back then so he was just “slow.” I agree people with certain disabilities were often institutionalized. I never knew anyone with Down syndrome growing up; now they are often mainstreamed into public schools with aides, like my friend’s son, and given support to work in bagging jobs and the like when before they wouldn’t have been out in public.