Mental Capacity
William Henry Johnson may not have been a true microcephalic; he may have merely had an oddly-shaped head. Additionally, he possibly did not suffer the mental retardation that microcephalics often suffer. There has been some interest in ascertaining Zip's actual mental capacity.
William Henry's sister, Sarah van Duyne, claimed in a 1926 interview that her brother would "converse like the average person, and with fair reasoning power".
According to the interview with his sister, Zip's last words to her were "Well, we fooled 'em for a long time, didn't we?"
Read more about this topic: Zip The Pinhead
Famous quotes containing the words mental capacity, mental and/or capacity:
“Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Walther Frank, Julius Streicher and Robert Ley did pass under my inspection and interrogation in 1945 but they only proved that National Socialism was a gangster interlude at a rather low order of mental capacity and with a surprisingly high incidence of alcoholism.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“Women ought to feel a peculiar sympathy in the colored man’s wrong, for, like him, she has been accused of mental inferiority, and denied the privileges of a liberal education.”
—Angelina Grimké (1805–1879)
“People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can’t know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do—after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world’s anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)