Down en zijn syndroom

John Langdon Haydon Down (1828-1896) was born in Torpoint, Cornwall (United Kingdom), as the son of a grocer cum pharmacist. At age 18, after having assisted in his father’s shop for 4 years, he went to London; first as a surgeon’s apprentice and subsequently as an assistant to the Pharmaceutical Society. Illness, probably tuberculosis, forced him to go back home. After his father died in 1853, he returned to London to study medicine. Despite having received various honours and prizes, he opted for the humble post of physician at the ‘Asylum for Idiots’ in Earlswood, Surrey, in 1858. Soon afterwards, he was also awarded a consultant post at the London Hospital. In 1868, after a falling-out with the Board of Directors of the asylum about his wife’s involvement, he moved to Hampton Wick and established a private facility called Normansfield, in which retarded children were not only cared for but also educated. Down’s observation that Caucasian patients could show features of other ‘races’ was in line with his liberal convictions about ‘the unity of the human species’. The most striking example concerned ‘mongoloid’ children, whose facial features and mental characteristics he had described in 1866. He presumed that there was ‘a unity of cause’, which was later confirmed by the discovery of the trisomy of chromosome 21 in 1959. Normansfield continued on under the supervision of John’s two sons and a grandson, but was eventually closed down in the 1970s. The buildings have been preserved and contain a famous Victorian theatre.

Conflict of interest: none declared. Financial support: J.P. Gijselhart works part time for the Association of the Dutch Journal of Medicine (Vereniging Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde), Amsterdam.