Introduction

Abstract

The diagnosis of ‘dyslexia’ and the medical problematisation of reading difficulties were almost unknown 100 years ago, yet today the British Dyslexia Association (2010) estimates that up to 10% of the UK population may have some form of dyslexia; in the USA it is estimated to be as much as 20% of the population (Marazzi, 2011a). The first diagnosis of dyslexia-like symptoms as a congenital impairment was recorded in Morgan’s (1896) paper in the British Medical Journal, ‘A Case of Congenital Word Blindness’. At the turn of the twentieth century five people had been diagnosed as dyslexic; at the turn of the twentyfirst century, the Dyslexia Institute estimated that there are six million individuals who could be diagnosed with some form of dyslexia in the UK alone.¹ At the turn of the twentieth century, fewer than ten articles had been published on reading disabilities, yet today a search for dyslexia on Google Scholar returns 120,000 entries. With this rapid growth in numbers of diagnoses and the proliferation of pages written on this topic, it is no surprise that in the middle of the twentieth century dyslexia was proclaimed to be the disease of the century (Mucchielli, 1963). Throughout the twentieth century, laboring began to increasingly rely upon our linguistic and communicative capacities.