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)
“The entire construct of the medical model of mental illnessMwhat is it but an analogy? Between physical medicine and psychiatry: the mind is said to be subject to disease in the same manner as the body. But whereas in physical medicine there are verifiable physiological proofsin damaged or affected tissue, bacteria, inflammation, cellular irregularityin mental illness alleged socially unacceptable behavior is taken as a symptom, even as proof, of pathology.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination.”
—William Hazlitt (17781830)