Mary and Beamon Triplet Forest, Mississippi, placed their three year old son in an institution. Doctor said it was for the best. Donald was different. He didn't run to his father when he returned home from work, he didn't snuggle his mother. In that era, scientists and academics and politicians classified people like Donald as defective or deranged, a threat
to society. I mean, I don't think people are that familiar with the fact that from really the early nineteen hundreds up until the beginning of World War two, essentially eugenics was really a big movement to the United States. That meant judging babies like cattle or sheep in contests and county affairs across the country. The triplets eventually changed their mind. They brought Donald's home and then to Baltimore to see a founder of child psychiatry, Dr Lee O'Connor,
and that visit changed history. Of course, the at the time, autism wasn't even a word. Nobody knew you know about it or anything. Case one Donald T. That's how he appears in Dr Connor's work, And seven decades later we tracked Donald T down. You got a book up there. What a book? This book is that you de boom about you and John, Well, it's about you, accellent, Yeah, actually about me. I'm Karen Zucker and I'm John don Vent for us, finding Donald Triplett was a mission. We
had to carry out a search for living history. And now you can beat him in our new podcast, Autism's First Child. But when we went to Forest in search of Donald, we found so much more. Well, I've always known do I don't remember not knowing Don. It's all we loved on. He's a most famous person. We found a whole community that embraced him and learned about Donald's remarkable life. It's hard not to love him. He's involved in the country club. He has friends there, he has
friends everywhere. It's a story at the intersection of class, race, and resources. It's a story about empathy and understanding and a diagnosis that changed history. Listen to Autism's First Child, an I Heart original podcast, starting April fourteen, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows.