Schmitt, C. (1918); et al
The origins of the term 'word-blindness' are variously reported but most historical researchers point to Kussmaul, a german physician, as the first to use the phrase (Loriaux, 2010), although according to Smythe (2011) and many other researchers and historians, an earlier physician and opthamologist, , Rudolf Berlin was the first to connect the idea of 'word-blindness' to the term 'dyslexia'. It is of note that even at this very early stage of interest in 'word-blindness' the discussion about the causes was already divided with some defining the cause as neurobiological whilst others advocated discrepancies in the processing of visually acquired information that is specifically lexical.
Smythe (ibid) as well as many others including Snowling (1996) attribute the first 'case' of developmental dyslexia as that reported by Pringle-Morgan (1896) who, in interpreting the previously-coined term 'word blindness' ascribed to the view that the difficulties in learning to read that he and others had observed was caused by visual processing difficulties. Indeed, in a more contemporary version of this theory for dyslexia, the magno-cellular view (sic) of dyslexia, Evans (2003) amongst others, remains a strong advocate of this explanation of the cause of the apparently disturbed linkage between visual recognition of words and text, and the phonological processing of the images that are subsequently sent to the brain.
The full paper is available in the project journal resources -> repository 3