Week 11/ Draft 4

In 1866, John Langdon Down, physician and medical superintendent of the Earlswood Asylum in Surrey, England, noticed a remarkable resemblance among a number of his intellectually disabled patients: all of them possessed a broad, flat face, a small nose, and oval-shaped eyes. Their features were so similar, in fact, that he felt that they might easily be mistaken for children from the same family. Down did not understand the cause of their intellectual disability, but his original description faithfully records the physical characteristics of people with this genetic form of intellectual disability. In his honor, the disorder is today known as Down syndrome.