Discovery of Angelman Syndrome

The first glimmer of hope for diagnosis, and ultimately care and treatment of Angelman Syndrome came as a result of the work and research of Dr. Harry Angelman in 1965.
In 1965, Dr. Harry Angelman, an English physician, first described three children with characteristics now known as the Angelman syndrome (AS). He noted that all had a stiff, jerky gait, absent speech, excessive laughter and seizures. Other cases were eventually published but the condition was considered to be extremely rare and many physicians doubted its existence. The first reports from North America appeared in the early 1980s and within the last ten years many new reports have appeared . Dr. Angelman relates the following regarding his discovery of this syndrome.

“The history of medicine is full of interesting stories about the discovery of illnesses. The saga of Angelman syndrome is one such story. It was purely by chance that nearly thirty years ago three handicapped children were admitted at various times to my children's ward in England. They had a variety of disabilities and although, at first sight, they seemed to be suffering from different conditions, I felt that there was a common cause for their illness. The diagnosis was purely a clinical one because, in spite of technical investigations which today are more refined, I was unable to establish scientific proof that the three children all had the same handicap. In view of this I hesitated to write about them in the medical journals. However, when on holiday in Italy I happened to see an oil painting in the Castelvecchio museum in Verona called . . . a Boy with a Puppet. The boy's laughing face and the fact that my patients exhibited jerky movements gave me the idea of writing an article about the three children with a title of Puppet Children. It was not a name that pleased all parents but it served as a means of combining the three little patients into a single group. Later the name was changed to Angelman syndrome. This article was published in 1965, and after some initial interest, lay almost forgotten until the early eighties.