LINDA MOTTRAM: Well, there’ve been huge advances in the understanding of autism but the story of what was separately named Asperger’s syndrome has an unsettling past. The syndrome was named after the war-time Vienna-based, paediatrician, Dr Hans Asperger, and a cloud has long hung over his sympathies. The World Health Organization recently folded Asperger’s syndrome […]
His medical assessment was grim. The child, not yet 3, showed signs of mental and physical impairment after an illness that caused inflammation in the brain, he said. “Severe personality disorder,” Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger wrote in a diagnostic report in summer 1941. “Most severe motoric retardation; erethic idiocy; seizures.” An old black-and-white photo showed the small girl, […]
The Austrian doctor Hans Asperger cooperated extensively with the Nazi regime and may have sent dozens of children to their deaths. Horrific details of his involvement were revealed yesterday in the journal Molecular Autism and will be detailed in a forthcoming book called Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna. Asperger was among the first researchers to describe […]
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 […]