Hans Asperger

Hans Asperger (German /aspɛʁɡɐ/) (Vienna, February 18, 1906 - October 21, 1980) was an Austrian physician and pediatrician. Noted for his early studies of atypical neurology, specifically in children, he is the namesake of autism spectrum disorder, Asperger's syndrome. He wrote more than 300 publications on psychological disorders that posthumously gained international renown in the 1980s. His diagnosis of autism, which he termed "autistic psychopathy," has also sparked controversy. Another controversy arose in the mid-2010s over implausible and untruthfully substantiated allegations that Asperger collaborated by referring children to a Nazi German clinic responsible for murdering disabled patients, beyond that controversy regarding his knowledge and participation is a subject that remains unknown.

Biography

Hans Asperger was born in Vienna and grew up on a farm outside Vienna. He was the younger of two children. He had difficulty making friends, and was considered a lonely child.During his childhood, Asperger seems to have exhibited some of the features of the syndrome bearing his name. He was someone with a gift for language, being particularly interested in the Austrian poet Franz Grillparzer, whose work he frequently recited to his classmates. He liked to quote his own words, and often referred to himself from a third-person perspective.

Asperger studied medicine at the University of Vienna under Franz Hamburger and did an internship at the Children's University Hospital in Vienna. He graduated as a doctor of medicine in 1931 and became director of the special education department at the Vienna University Children's Clinic in 1932. He joined the Austrofascist Austrian Patriotic Front on May 10, 1934, nine days after Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss passed a new constitution making himself a dictator. He married in 1935 and had five children.

Career

During World War II he was a medical officer, serving in the Axis occupation of Croatia; his younger brother died in the battle of Stalingrad.Towards the end of the war, Asperger opened a school for children with Sister Victorine Zak. In a bombing she was killed, and the school was destroyed along with much of Asperger's early research.^{[citation needed]}

Asperger published a definition of autistic psychopathy in 1944 that was basically identical to the one previously published by the Russian neurologist Grunya Sukhareva (Груня Ефимовна Сухарева) in 1926. In her report, a synthesis of her studies on dozens of children, Asperger identified a pattern of behavior in four boys that included "a lack of empathy, poor friendship skills, self-talk, intense fixation on a certain topic, and strange movements".^{[citation needed]} Asperger called these children with autistic psychopathy "little teachers" due to his ability to discuss his favorite interests in great detail. Asperger found that many of the children diagnosed as autistic used their talents as adults and led successful careers. One of them became a professor of astronomy and corrected an error in Newton's work that he had discovered as a student.Another of his patients was the writer and Nobel Prize winner for Literature Elfriede Jelinek.

In 1944, after the publication of his landmark paper describing the symptoms of autism, he found a tenure at the University of Vienna. Shortly after the war ended, he became director of the city's children's clinic. He was appointed chief of pediatrics at the University, a position he held for 20 years. he later he worked in Innsbruck. Since 1964, he headed SOS Children's Villages in Hinterbrühl.

Relation to Nazi genocide

Edith Sheffer, a specialist in modern European history, wrote in 2016 that Asperger cooperated with the Nazi regime, including sending children to the Spiegelgrund clinic that participated in the Nazi extermination program euphemistically termed euthanasia.

Sheffer wrote a book developing his research titled Asperger's Children: Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna.

Another researcher and historian at the Medical University of Vienna, Herwig Czech, wrote in an article in the journal Molecular Autism published in April 2018:

Asperger adapted to the Nazi regime and was rewarded for his loyalty with job opportunities. He was part of several Nazi-related organizations, although not directly with the Nazi party, and publicly legitimized racial hygiene policies that included forced sterilization and, on several occasions, actively cooperated with the children ' s euthanasia programme.

Herwig Czech

Thus, while for some the fact that he had never been a member of the Nazi party is considered sufficient proof that he was not a fanatic, for others precisely the fact that he had not been a member guaranteed him that his complicity with criminals has gone unnoticed by justice, thus ensuring that his life passed smoothly after the war and he died peacefully in 1980.

Important Developments

His works were published exclusively in German. British researcher Lorna Wing proposed the name in her 1981 article, Asperger's Syndrome: A Clinical Account, which challenged the previously accepted model of autism, put forward by Leo Kanner in 1943. It was not until 1991 that a reliable translation of Asperger's work was made, carried out by Uta Frith; prior to this, the syndrome had been "virtually unknown". Frith stated that some fundamental diagnostic questions had not been resolved, and that the scientific data to address them did not exist. Unlike Kanner, who eclipsed Asperger, the latter's findings were ignored or despised in the English-speaking world for as long as he lived. In the early 1990s, the Austrian's work achieved greater prominence due to Wing's research and Frith's recent translation, leading to the name's inclusion in the ICD-10 in 1993, and in the DSM-IV in 1994, half a century after the first investigations of Asperger. The World Health Organization's ICD-10 describes the syndrome as "a disorder of uncertain nosological validity," and there is a majority consensus to phase it out of the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manual.

In her 1944 article, as translated by Uta Frith in 1991, Asperger wrote,

We are convinced, therefore, that autistic people have their place within the body of the social community. They do well with their role, perhaps better than any other could, and we are talking about people who when they were children had the greatest difficulties and caused countless concerns to their caregivers.

Eric Schopler wrote in 1998:

Asperger's publications did not trigger research, replication, or interest before 1980. Instead, they suggested a fertile field of cultivation for the confusion of diagnoses that has arisen since 1980.

Asperger's birthday, February 18, was declared International Asperger Syndrome Day.

Selected Articles

• Self-administerable test for early detection of Asperger, Autism and TGD: M-Chat, Q-Chat and CSBS
• Asperger H (1938). «Das psychisch abnormale Kind [The psychically abnormal child]». Wien Klin Wochenschr (in German) 51: 1314-7.
• Asperger H (1944). «Die "Autistischen Psychopathen" im Kindesalter [Autist psychopathology in childhood]». Archiv für psychiatrie und nervenkrankheiten (in German) 117: 76-136. doi:10.1007/BF01837709.
• Asperger H (1952). Heilpädagogik. Einführung in die Psychopathologie des Kindes für Árzte, Lehrer, Psychologen, Richter und Fürsorgerinnen [Pedagogy curative. Introduction to child psychopathology for the use of doctors, teachers, psychologists, judges, and social assistants] (in German).
• Asperger H (1968). «[On the differential diagnosis of early infantile autism]». Acta Paedopsychiatr (in German) 35 (4): 136-45. PMID 4880461.
• Asperger H (1974). "[Early childhood autism]." Med Klin (in German) 69 (49): 2024-7. PMID 4444665.
• Asperger H (1977). "[Life lived. 50 years of pediatrics]." Padiatr Padol (in German) 12 (3): 214-23. PMID 331197.