Short answers, pulled from the story.
Rudolf Berlin coined the term dyslexia in 1883 to describe a young boy who struggled with reading and writing despite having typical intelligence. Oswald Berkhan clinically described the condition in 1881 before Rudolf Berlin coined the term two years later.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging shows less activation in parts of the left hemisphere involved with reading such as the inferior frontal gyrus and inferior parietal lobule. Meta-analyses found under-activation where the temporal and occipital lobes meet in the left hemisphere.
Before the 1980s, society viewed dyslexia as a consequence of poor education rather than a neurological disability. Modern neurodevelopmental understanding now recognizes it as a specific learning disorder with impairment in reading.
English and French have deep phonemic orthographies within the Latin alphabet system while languages such as Spanish, Italian, and Finnish primarily employ letter-sound correspondence making them easier to learn for people with dyslexia. Chinese characters pose problems because they use logographic symbols where one character represents an individual phoneme.
Several genes have been associated with dyslexia including DCDC2 and KIAA0319 on chromosome 6. Abnormal cell formations occur in non-language cerebral structures as well.