My son’s school, David Starr Jordan Middle School, is being renamed. A seventh grader exposed the honoree, Stanford University’s first president, as a prominent eugenicist of the early 20th century who championed sterilization of the “unfit.” This sort of debate is happening all over the country, as communities fight over whether to tear down Confederate monuments […]
Little Herta Schreiber had been taken to the pediatric clinic at the University Hospital in Vienna in June 1941, just two months short of her third birthday. The youngest of nine, the child had been sick for months after contracting encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain probably due to infection, earlier that year. Her symptoms […]
Historian Sheffer (Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain) examines the confounding legacy of Austrian psychiatrist Hans Asperger, who worked with autistic children during the 1930s and ’40s, unveiling a figure who initially offered benevolent support to some autistic children, but then death to others. In 1937, Asperger advocated a nonjudgmental […]