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, […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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