Beyond the name

Down's syndrome: John Langdon Haydon Down (1828-96)

John Down was born in Cornwall to an Irish-Cornish family in 1828. His scientific interest began as a child and progressed when he left school at the age of 13 to help his father in the pharmacy business. He moved to London at 18 to work as surgeon's assistant in Whitechapel. Down remained there for only a few months because he found work at the laboratories of the Pharmaceutical Society in Bloomsbury Square, London.

Down entered London Hospital Medical School at the age of 25. He excelled as a student and was predicted a brilliant career as a hospital doctor by his teachers. However, he surprised everyone by taking a post at the Earlswood Asylum for Idiots in Surrey in 1858. The next year Down was elected as an assistant doctor to the London Hospital and spent the next decade sharing his time between the two institutions.

Down's definitive monograph, Observations on an Ethnic Classification of Idiots, published in 1866, contained the classic description of the condition which now bears his name. He also described the vast improvements in speech and coordination that could be made if the children were given dedicated systematic training. Down believed the affected children to be part of the Mongolian race, being “examples of retrogression... of departure from one type [of race] and the assumption of the characteristics of another.” This led to the condition being called “Mongolian idiocy.” It was not until 1959 that the extra chromosome 21 was found to be the underlying abnormality, and in 1965 Mongolism was officially renamed as Down's syndrome.