The Age of Autism

The debate on autism today is approaching fever pitch. From ‘refrigerator parents’ to vaccines, the causes of what has been dubbed ‘the autism epidemic’ have been hotly contested.

When Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill set out to trace the rise of autism, their research led them into the history of other degenerative neurological disorders, and they uncovered clues that existing theories had missed. Incredible and previously unacknowledged links appeared between the rise of crippling bouts of syphilis that left the sufferers raving mad, a spike in the incidence of schizophrenia in 19th-century London, and similarities among the parents of the first children diagnosed with autism in the 1940s.

The Age of Autism connects these dots to form a startling new thesis: that exposure to mercury — the most toxic non-radioactive substance known to man — was behind the rise of these disorders and many others. Across ten chapters that address various turbulent medical epochs, Olmsted and Blaxill have crafted a narrative that is original, disturbing, but ultimately optimistic. In the tradition of Silent Spring and An Inconvenient Truth, this groundbreaking book points the way to a safer future for our children and our planet.