In April, 1961, The Lancet published a letter to the Editor1 written by 19 well known geneticists who proposed that the terms mongolian idiocy, mongolism, and mongoloid, with their misleading racial connotations, be replaced by Langdon-Down anomaly, Down's syndrome anomaly, congenital acromicria,ortrisomy 21 anomaly. This letter, reprinted the same year by the American journal of Human Genetics, was decisive in a change that has affected not only the medical vocabulary and the scientific literature but also the way in which the media and laypeople address the disease today.
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