Literary Hub is an organizing principle in the service of literary culture, a single, trusted, daily source for all the news, ideas and richness of contemporary literary life. There is more great literary content online than ever before, but it is scattered, easily lost—with the help of its editorial partners, Lit Hub is a site readers […]
By Jill Escher A new book by Bay Area scholar of German history Edith Sheffer tells a detailed, grisly story of the Nazi disability death machine and the role within it played by Hans Asperger, the Vienna clinician for whom the now defunct diagnosis of “Asperger’s Syndrome” was named. “Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism […]
Most of us think of Dr. Hans Asperger as a benevolent and compassionate Austrian psychiatrist whose penetrating analysis of pediatric “psychopathy” led to our present understanding of the autism spectrum of disorders. He has been regarded as a considerate defender of children with disabilities and a leader among Vienna psychiatrists. In this groundbreaking study of […]
Julia Boyd reviews Asperger’s Children by Edith Sheffer To anyone who thought of Hans Asperger as a brilliant doctor whose pioneering work in child psychiatry led to a more enlightened understanding of autism, Edith Sheffer’s book will come as a nasty shock. At first, he seems set to emerge a hero. After all, anyone who could […]
Long-deceased Viennese doctors, unless they’re called Freud, rarely make newspaper headlines. But one has recently done so on both sides of the Atlantic. On April 19, the academic open-access journal Molecular Autism published a detailed article by the Austrian medical historian Herwig Czech about Hans Asperger, the Viennese pediatrician whose name has since the 1980s designated a […]
What we now call autism has surely been a part of the human condition for as long as human beings have existed. But the way different cultures understand, talk about and treat people who exhibit the symptoms of autism — difficulty or disinterest in social interactions, repetitive behaviors and language impairments — can vary widely. […]