 Dyslexia was identified by Oswald Berkhan in 1881 , but the term dyslexia was coined in 1887 by Rudolf Berlin , an ophthalmologist in Stuttgart . He used the term to refer to the case of a young boy who had a severe impairment in learning to read and write , despite showing typical intelligence and physical abilities in all other respects . In 1896 , W. Pringle Morgan , a British physician from Seaford , East Sussex , published a description of a reading @-@ specific learning disorder in a report to the British Medical Journal titled " Congenital Word Blindness " . The distinction between phonological and surface types of dyslexia is only descriptive , and without any etiological assumption as to the underlying brain mechanisms . However , studies have alluded to potential differences due to variation in performance . 
