The first diagnosis of developmental dyslexia appeared in The British Medical Journal in 1896: "A Case of Congenital Word Blindness" by W. Pringle Morgan. It was an account of a 14 year old boy, Percy: "...in spite of this laborious and persistent training, he can only with difficulty spell out words of one syllable". "The schoolmaster who taught him for some years says that he would be the smartest lad in the school if the instruction were entirely oral." The very first reference may be Valerius Maximus (c30 AD), who writes about an Athenian scholar who "lost his memory of letters" after being struck in the head with a stone and Pliny (23-79 AD) who says of the same man that "with the stroke of a stone, (he) fell presently to forget his letters only, and could read no more; otherwise his memory served him well enough" (in Benton and Joynt 1960)."