Are "mutes" in literature supposed to be autistic?

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One of my favorite books is "King of the Wind" by Marguerite Henry. It's about a boy from Morocco who takes care of an Arabian horse. Aparently it is a true story. The boy is described as "mute" and never speaks verbaly but he can "communicate" with his horse. Aparently he can't speak verbably. Are accounts of "mutes" in literature really accounts of autistics?

Last edited by PunkyKat on 30 Oct 2010, 11:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I don't think so.

There are lots of people who don't like to speak without being autistic.

Especially when they're more at ease with animals than with other people.

Expressive speech disorders can be a part of autism or a singular entity. I actually think it's more common in individuals without autism than it is with.

Some of them were born deaf.

ruveyn

The boy in King of the Wind could hear.

I think high fevers can cause infants to go deaf or mute. They really did not have antibiotics back in the ancient times so maybe infections or fevers went unchallenged did major damage to the young.

Some are mute but can still hear (just as some deaf people can speak). There are many conditions which can justifu mutism, however, I do feel that in the past, many "mute" people had various disorders which are now known and were all more or less considered to be the same problem.

What the Deaf Man Heard. Oh right...he lied. Nevermind.

What I meant to say was: Expressive speech disorder by itself is more common than autism. Many with autism have it, but it's not needed.

As a matter of fact it's antibiotics (mainly aminoglycosides) that did and still cause a lot of damage to hearing in children.

But seriously, as ruveyn said above, in quite a number of cases muteness is due to deafness, not to a speech disorder.
It is true that some deaf people can speak but they can't learn on their own if the deafness is prelingual (that is, if the age of onset was before spoken language developed), they need to be taught specifically how to talk without hearing.

There are autistics who are mute, then there are mutes.