Let me confess at the outset that before the 1988 film “Rain Man” – about an autistic savant named Raymond Babbitt – I knew virtually nothing about autism.
Like most people, I’d never known anyone with the disorder or even heard anyone talk about it. Which is hardly surprising, says Maureen Durkin, a University of Wisconsin-Madison epidemiologist, because before the 1990s, autism was considered an extremely rare developmental disorder, affecting about 1 in every 2,500 children in this country.