[Context: They’re referring to Vivian Ann Murdock, who they claim is the first child of the titular age of autism]

Vivian was directly in the path of at least three mercury vectors:

-- the first use of mercury-preserved vaccines in Baltimore -- a drive to vaccinate every infant with those shots began the month she was born;

-- her parents' avocation of orchid growing and breeding, which required intensive application of chemicals including mercury;

-- and her father’s psychiatric career, which brought him – and probably his family through second-hand exposure – in contact with mercury treatments for a common form of insanity.

Mercury is no longer used in agriculture or mental health treatment. But each year, 100 million children worldwide get vaccines containing thimerosal, the ethylmercury preservative first used in those shots in Baltimore. In the United States, flu shots, most of which contain mercury, are recommended for pregnant women and for infants beginning at 6 months of age.

Our research on Vivian and the other first cases of autism suggests that is a very bad idea.

[…]

Our own research convinced us the autism rate before 1930 was effectively zero (it is now 1 in 50). A handful of cases over several centuries might conceivably qualify, but there was nothing approaching the cluster of children whose worried parents brought them to see Leo Kanner in the years between 1938 and 1943.

[…]

Within a few short years, Kanner was calling the mothers and fathers of autistic children “refrigerator parents,” claiming that must have something to do with the genesis of the baffling disorder. […]

Kanner later abandoned that idea entirely, as has the medical community, but not before Bruno Bettelheim ruled autism orthodoxy, and ruined untold lives, with his claim that infants retreated into “the empty fortress” of autism in fear of their mother’s homicidal feelings.