Roy Meadow

Okay.

And I read Roy Meadows' article about a mother who poisoned her son with salt to get him dehydrated, get him into the hospital for attention.

And then I worked up the case I was seeing, and it turned out not to be Munchausen by proxy.

It turned out that the kiddo had a real genetic condition.

A British psychiatrist named Richard Asher named Munchausen syndrome in 1951 for patients who faked or induced illness in themselves.

In 1977, a doctor named Roy Meadow identified the version where somebody does it to another person and called it Munchausen by proxy.

It's been in the psychiatric manual since 1980.

These days, the clinical name is factitious disorder, and the professionals who work these cases will tell you that the diagnosis belongs to the perpetrator, never the victim.