Critchley (1964,1970), Orton (1925), Anderson & Meier-Hedde (2001) and Howell (2019) have commented on Berkhan and his work. Observations made included that Berkhan had focused on students characterized by articulation, stammering, and writing difficulties, not reading problems; that he identified some students as having reading problems but provided no details; and that he drew his students from a population known for deficiencies in intelligence. None of these commentators credited Berkhan with being the first to identify dyslexia.

Berkhan - His Students

The setting in which Berkhan carried out his observations has prompted the question of whether he observed children with dyslexia. For example, "… Berkhan [has] occasionally been cited as [a pioneer] in the history of developmental dyslexia. This is unlikely, for [his] patients were essentially mental defectives, and an inability to read was merely one aspect of their global defect in learning" (Critchley, 1970). This judgment has been made by others (Orton, 1925; Anderson & Meier-Hedde, 2001) and warrants assessment.

Berkhan (1917) used the term Hilfsklasse (lit. "Helping class") as the venue for the children he observed indicating they attended a type of remedial school (Hilfsschule) then developing in Germany. Such schools were popularly associated with children with intelligence deficiencies (Sherlock & Lond, 1905).

While Germany's Hilfsschulen were associated with children with intelligence deficiencies, students therein actually exhibited a range of types of deficiencies (Opp, 2001). Berkhan himself noted that some of his students had no reading problems (Berkhan, 1917). There is good reason to assume that there were students with dyslexia among those Berkhan observed.

Berkhan - Did He Identify Dyslexia?

Accepting as a given that some number of students with dyslexia were in the cohort that Berkhan observed, the question becomes whether his reports contained evidence that he identified and provided a description for these students recognizable as dyslexia? Howell (2019) examined this question for all the sources cited by Berkhan's creditors (Berkhan, 1917, 1886, 1885).

The basic clinical observations made by Berkhan himself relevant to this matter are found in his 1885 report. Forty-four students were drawn from two classes of a single Hilfsschule in Braunschweig, Lower Saxony (Kielhorn & Adam, 1931) in 1881. From this group writing samples screened out 20 students with attributes of the sort Berkhan was looking for: problems of articulation, stammering, and writing. To this group of 20 he added an additional three students because of their "special interest." While Berkhan's study focused on students with the aforementioned problems, reading capabilities were noted but only in terse language: "bad reading; poor reading; reads poorly; able to read; reads moderately well; good reading." No augmenting information accompanied these descriptions. No clinical descriptors recognizable as dyslexia were presented. Review of his other publications (1886, 1917) also provided no evidence of his identification of what came to be called dyslexia (Howell, 2019).

Could Berkhan, some 30 years after his early observations, retrospectively "remember" an earlier awareness of dyslexia? Of special relevance to this question are his 1917 updates of three males who were among those he observed in the 1880s. What did he say about these cases? In two of the cases his comments covered well into their adult years but continued to focus on articulation, stammering, and writing problems and not on reading. His updating remarks in these two cases provided no clinical descriptors that conveyed that the subjects had dyslexia. The third subject updated was a student for whom Berkhan provided comments relevant to the youngster's 11th through 15th years. He asserted that this youth initially exhibited several reading problems (no detail provided) and that in year 15 these problems no longer existed. No other information or explanation was given about the boy. In these three cases Berkhan had the opportunity to present them in a way which could have validated a diagnosis of congenital word blindness (dyslexia). This he did not do. Thus, none of the sources used to credit Berkhan provided confirming evidence (Howell, 2019).