A tweet asking why nobody had autism, ADHD or food allergies back in the 1960s has resurfaced online, and the replies are just as savage now as they were the first time round.
It came from an account called @Jenny_1884, English and British flags in the bio, self-described Brexiteer and Reform UK supporter. “Growing up in the 60s you never heard of anyone with!!!” she wrote, then listed off food allergies, autism, ADHD, gluten intolerance and dairy intolerance. “Why?”
The point she was going for, presumably, is that something’s gone badly wrong with modern life, that these conditions either didn’t exist back then or were vanishingly rare. There’s a much simpler answer, though: people had all of these things. Doctors just didn’t have the diagnostic tools, the criteria, or the awareness to properly recognise any of them.
The internet was, as ever, delighted to explain this, just not always in the tone you’d get from an NHS leaflet.
“Up until 1860 there was no such thing as germs”
The top reply came from @PastorAlexLove, who simply followed her logic to its obvious conclusion. “Exactly!!!” he wrote. “Up until 1860 there was no such thing as ‘germs’ or ‘bacteria’, then suddenly they existed out of nowhere. I want to go back to 1859 when there was no such things as germs. I want my country back.”
Hard to miss the point. Nothing springs into existence the moment we finally develop the language or the tools to describe it. People were dying of infections long before germ theory caught on. Gravity was doing its thing centuries before anyone got round to writing down the equations. Autism and ADHD were shaping people’s lives well before there were modern words for any of it.
@CM_67 put it even more bluntly: “People who grew up in the early 1600s didn’t know gravity was a thing. Doesn’t mean it didn’t fuckin exist.” Tens of thousands of likes on that one.
Diagnosis isn’t the same thing as invention
The NHS describes autism as a lifelong developmental difference, and plenty of autistic adults learn to mask or adapt their behaviour, which means the signs aren’t always obvious from the outside. That alone goes some way to explaining why someone who grew up decades ago might not remember ever knowingly meeting an autistic person.
The kids who’d get an assessment and support today were still there back then. A lot of them just got called difficult, shy, obsessive, badly behaved, odd. Others ended up in institutions, pushed out of mainstream schooling, or learned to hide traits that got them punished or mocked instead. Women and girls in particular went, and still go, unrecognised at much higher rates, because their symptoms often don’t match the old textbook stereotypes doctors were trained to look for.
Same story with ADHD. It starts in childhood, though plenty of people aren’t diagnosed until they’re adults. The NHS notes it’s spotted less often in women, partly because inattentive symptoms are just harder to notice than someone visibly bouncing off the walls.
@mitchelld199 summed it up as plainly as anyone: “People did have autism and ADHD back then. People were institutionalised for it.” Not every undiagnosed person ended up institutionalised, obviously, but a lot of disabled and neurodivergent people were pulled out of ordinary community life under systems we’d now call abusive without hesitation. Just because someone doesn’t remember them from childhood doesn’t mean they weren’t there.
Food allergies and coeliac disease weren’t invented by supermarkets either
The original post also lumped together food allergies, dairy intolerance and gluten intolerance, which aren’t remotely the same thing medically. A food allergy is an immune response, sometimes life-threatening. Lactose intolerance is about not being able to digest the sugar in milk properly. Coeliac disease is an autoimmune condition where gluten actually damages the gut lining.
Coeliac disease definitely wasn’t dreamed up alongside the free-from aisle at Tesco. It was described by the Greek physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia nearly 2,000 years ago, and the specific role gluten plays was worked out during the Second World War. The Coeliac Society, now Coeliac UK, was founded in 1968, and by 1972 it was already handing out tens of thousands of copies of a food guide to help people manage a gluten-free diet.
The condition affects roughly one in 100 people in the UK. Coeliac UK reckons only 36% of them are actually diagnosed, meaning around half a million people could be living with it right now without knowing.
Food allergies genuinely have become more common in recent decades too, so it’s not purely a case of better recognition, scientists are still trying to figure out why. But better diagnosis, more awareness and better reporting all mean cases that would once have been shrugged off or completely misunderstood are now far more likely to get the right label. A kid who kept getting ill after eating a certain food might once have just been written off as “sickly.” A severe reaction could get recorded by whatever symptoms showed up, with nobody ever properly tracing it back to the actual trigger.
Not knowing why something was happening never meant it wasn’t happening.
The historical comparisons kept coming
Other users found their own increasingly creative ways to make the same point. @alice_the_saint wrote: “Growing up in the 1200s you never heard of anyone with!!!” followed by bubonic plague, cancer, pneumonic plague and dropsy. “Why?” she asked.
Works precisely because those things obviously existed at the time, whether or not anyone had the language for them or understood what caused them.
Then @FlapsO_Hoolahan pointed out the 1960s were also missing a fair few things nobody would seriously claim were made up. “You also didn’t have the internet, huge flat TVs and mapped DNA,” they wrote. “But then we learned about them and got to create them to advance life.” They followed that with an assessment of the original poster that really doesn’t belong in this article, but is out there in full if you go looking.
The past wasn’t healthier, people just suffered more quietly
There’s a genuinely persistent tendency to romanticise a time when nobody really talked about disability, mental health or chronic illness. It’s very easy to mistake silence for absence. If nobody at school ever mentioned autism, maybe autistic kids just got labelled “troublesome” instead. If nobody talked about an allergy, maybe families quietly avoided certain foods without ever knowing why. If ADHD never came up, plenty of people probably spent their whole lives blaming themselves for struggles that now have an actual explanation.
More visibility can trick people into thinking a condition’s suddenly become trendy or wildly more common overnight. Often what’s actually happened is that people who were already struggling, without help, without a name for it, finally have the words to explain what’s been going on. Medicine’s genuinely gotten better too. Diagnostic criteria evolve, research moves forward, and doctors get better at spotting conditions across groups of people who used to get missed entirely.
That’s really just what progress looks like.
The best replies clocked the actual flaw in the original post immediately: your own memory of what one bloke didn’t hear about at school in 1965 isn’t a reliable record of what existed in society at the time. As thousands of people, some patiently, some sarcastically, plenty of them just swearing, took the time to point out, someone not having heard of a thing in the 1960s tells you a great deal more about the 1960s than it does about the thing itself.
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