History of ADHD

It began with a Poem 

Seeing a child who can't sit still is not an abnormal finding, but how do we differentiate between a normal active child and one who has ADHD? In 1845 Dr. Heinrich Hoffman, a German physician and psychiatrist was disillusioned with the children's literature of the time. In an attempt to find a suitable poem for his 3 year old son, he wrote the "Story of Fidgety Phillip" a poem in German about a boy who was always running about knocking things down. The description of "Fidgety Phillip" is the first written account of the classical symptoms of ADHD. Although the poem described ADHD the first scientific description of the disorder is credited to Sir George F. Still, who in 1902  published a series of lectures to the Royal College of Physicians in England in which he described a group of impulsive children with significant behavioral problems, caused by a genetic dysfunction and not by poor child rearing—children who today would be easily recognized as having ADHD. Since then, several thousand scientific papers on the disorder have been published, providing information on its nature, course, causes, impairments, and treatments.