Hans Asperger was an Austrian pediatrician, medical theorist, and
medical professor. He is best known for his early studies on mental disorders,
especially in children. His work was largely unnoticed during his lifetime
except for a few accolades in Vienna, and his studies on psychological
disorders only acquired world renown posthumously. There was a resurgence of
interest in his work beginning in the 1980s, and due to his earlier work which
was regarded by many to be under the fold of autism spectrum disorders, was
named after him. Both Asperger's original paediatric diagnosis of
autistic psychopathy and the eponymous diagnosis of Asperger syndrome that was
named for him several decades after are controversial.
Personal life Hans Asperger was born and raised on a
farm outside Vienna, Austria. The elder of two sons, Hans had difficulty finding
friends and was considered a lonely, remote child. He was talented in
language; in particular, he was interested in the Austrian poet Franz
Grillparzer, whose poetry he would frequently quote to his uninterested
classmates. He also liked to quote himself and often referred to himself
from a third-person perspective. Asperger studied medicine at the
University of Vienna under Franz Hamburger and practiced at the
University Children's Hospital in Vienna. He graduated doctor of medicine
in 1931 and became director of the special education section at the
university children's clinic in Vienna in 1932. 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 at Stalingrad. Near the end of the war,
Asperger opened a school for children with Sister Viktorine Zak. The school
was bombed and destroyed, Sister Viktorine was killed, and much of
Asperger's early work was lost. Georg Frankl was Asperger's chief
diagnostician until he moved from Austria to America and was hired by Leo
Kanner in 1937. Asperger published a definition of
autistic psychopathy in 1944 that was nearly identical with the definition
published earlier by a Russian neurologist Grunya Sukhareva in 1926.
Asperger identified in four boys a pattern of behavior and abilities that
included "a lack of empathy, little ability to form friendships, one-sided
conversations, intense absorption in a special interest, and clumsy movements".
Asperger called children with AP "little professors" because of their ability to
talk about their favorite subject in great detail. Asperger noticed that many
of the children he identified as being autistic used their special talents in
adulthood and had successful careers. One of them became a professor of
astronomy and solved an error in Newton’s work he had originally noticed
as a student. Another one of Asperger's patients was the Austrian writer and
Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, Elfriede Jelinek.
In 1944, after the publication of his landmark paper describing autistic
symptoms, Hans Asperger found a permanent tenured post at the University
of Vienna. Shortly after the war ended, he became director of a children's
clinic in the city. It was there that he was appointed chair of pediatrics at the
University of Vienna, a post he held for twenty years. He later held a post at
Innsbruck. Beginning in 1964, he headed the SOS-Kinderdorf in Hinterbrühl. He
became professor emeritus in 1977, and died three years later. AS was named
after Hans Asperger and officially recognized in the fourth edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1994; it was removed
from DSM-5 in 2013. Posthumous developments
Asperger died before his identification of this pattern of behaviour became
widely recognised. This was in part due to his work being exclusively in German
and as such it was little-translated; medical academics, then as now, also
disregarded Asperger's work based on its merits or lack thereof. English
researcher Lorna Wing proposed the condition Asperger's syndrome in a 1981
paper, Asperger's syndrome: a clinical account, that challenged the previously
accepted model of autism presented by Leo Kanner in 1943. It was not until
1991 that an authoritative translation of Asperger's work was made by Uta
Frith; before this AS had still been "virtually unknown". Frith said that
fundamental questions regarding the diagnosis had not been answered, and the
necessary scientific data to address this did not exist. Unlike Kanner, who
overshadowed Asperger, the latter's findings were ignored and disregarded in
the English-speaking world in his lifetime. In the early 1990s Asperger's
work gained some notice due to Wing's research on the subject and Frith's
recent translation, leading to the inclusion of the eponymous condition in
the ICD-10 in 1993, and the DSM-IV in 1994, some half a century after
Asperger's original research. Despite this brief resurgence of interest in his
work in the 1990s, AS remains a controversial and contentious diagnosis
due to its unclear relationship to the autism spectrum. The World Health
Organization's ICD describes AS as "a disorder of uncertain nosological
validity", and there was a majority consensus to phase the diagnosis out of
the American Psychiatric Association's diagnosis manual.
In his 1944 paper, as Uta Frith translated from the German in 1991,
Asperger wrote, We are convinced, then, that autistic
people have their place in the organism of the social community. They fulfill
their role well, perhaps better than anyone else could, and we are talking of
people who as children had the greatest difficulties and caused untold worries
to their care-givers. Eric Schopler wrote in 1998:
Asperger's own publications did not inspire research, replication, or
scientific interest prior to 1980. Instead, he laid the fertile groundwork
for the diagnostic confusion that has grown since 1980.
Asperger's birthday, February 18, was declared International Asperger's Day.
Selected papers Asperger H. "Das psychisch abnormale
Kind [The psychically abnormal child]". Wien Klin Wochenschr 51: 1314–7.
Asperger H. "Die "Autistischen Psychopathen" im Kindesalter [Autistic
psychopaths in childhood]". Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 117:
76–136. doi:10.1007/BF01837709. tp:www.springerlink.comu350x0683r1g6432/
Asperger H. "[On the differential diagnosis of early infantile autism]".
Acta Paedopsychiatr 35: 136–45. PMID 4880461.
Asperger H. "[Early infantile autism]". Med Klin 69: 2024–7. PMID 4444665.
Asperger H. "[The lived life. 50 years of pediatrics]". Padiatr Padol 12:
214–23. PMID 331197. References
Further reading Kathrin Hippler, Christian Klicpera. "A
Retrospective Analysis of the Clinical Case Records of 'Autistic Psychopaths'
Diagnosed by Hans Asperger and His Team at the University Children's Hospital,
Vienna". Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 358: 291–301.
doi:10.1098/rstb.2002.1197. JSTOR 3558142. PMC 1693115. PMID 12639327.
External links Paains story about Asperger — an
introduction to Asperger aimed at children