The meme treats Isaac Newton as proof that ADHD and autism aren’t new, but the real record is messier than the punchline. Newton didn’t rage-quit anything.
“There was no ADHD or autism back in my day.”
When plague reached Cambridge, the university sent its scholars home as a matter of course, and he went with them, returning to Woolsthorpe between 1665 and March 1667 with a short trip back in spring 1666. He came back and was elected a Trinity fellow in 1667.
What he did in those years is real. He later wrote he was “in the prime of my age for invention,” setting down fluxions in 1665-66, separating white light by refraction, and comparing the pull on the moon with the pull on Earth. The formal paper on light and colours came in early 1672, and universal gravitation wasn’t formulated until 1686, so calculus wasn’t built to explain one apple.
William Stukeley’s 1752 memoir has Newton recalling an apple falling as he sat thinking. It never hit him.
The skipped meals and near-sleepless nights are real too, just not from the plague years. His assistant Humphrey Newton, no relation, remembered a Cambridge Newton of the 1680s who forgot to eat, rarely slept before 2 or 3 in the morning, and read his lectures to a nearly empty room.
The autism angle traces to 2003, when Ioan James wrote in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine that Newton looked by standard criteria like an Asperger case, and Cambridge autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen agreed Newton and Einstein seemed fairly certain fits. Baron-Cohen also said a definite diagnosis of someone long dead is impossible.
The discussion named Asperger syndrome. Others pushed back: psychiatrist Glen Elliott called biographical diagnosis extremely unreliable and noted genius alone can make a person isolative, and a 2008 Royal Society paper tied Newton’s suspicion to his mother leaving him as a child and his 1692-93 breakdown to mercury exposure.