Everything about Hans Asperger totally explained
Hans Asperger (
February 18 1906 –
October 21 1980) was the
Austrian
pediatrician after whom
Asperger syndrome is named.
Life
Born on a farm outside
Vienna, Asperger displayed an early talent for languages. He was a member in the youth movements of the 1920s. He studied medicine in Vienna and earned his medical doctorate in 1931, and found his first job a year later as a member of the University Children's Hospital in Vienna. In 1934, his career developed with a move to the
psychiatric hospital in
Leipzig.
It isn't certain what Asperger did during the early years of
World War II. In the later years of the war he was a medical officer in
Croatia; his younger brother died in Stalingrad.
Asperger syndrome
Asperger published the first definition of
Asperger syndrome in
1944. In four boys, he identified a pattern of behavior and abilities that he called "autistic psychopathy", meaning autism (self) and psychopathy (personality disease). The pattern included "a lack of
empathy, little ability to form
friendships, one-sided
conversation, intense absorption in a special interest, and clumsy movements." Asperger called children with AS "little
professors" because of their ability to talk about their favorite subject in great detail. It is commonly said that the paper was based on only four boys. However, Dr. Günter Krämer, of
Zürich, who knew Asperger, states that it "was based on investigations of more than 400 children".
Asperger was convinced that many of the children he identified as having
autistic symptoms would use their special talents in
adulthood. He followed one child, Fritz V., into adulthood. Fritz V. became a professor of
astronomy and solved an error in
Newton’s work he originally noticed as a child. Hans Asperger’s positive outlook contrasts strikingly with
Leo Kanner's description of
autism, of which
Asperger's is often considered to be a high-functioning form. In his 1944 paper, written during Nazi rule whose policies included killing mentally handicapped and socially deviant people, Asperger wrote:
We are convinced, then, that autistic people have their place in the organism of the social community. They fulfil their role well, perhaps better than anyone else could, and we're talking of people who as children had the greatest difficulties and caused untold worries to their care-givers.
Near the end of
World War II, Asperger opened a
school for children with
autistic psychopathy, with Sister Victorine. The school was bombed towards the end of the war, Sister Victorine was killed, the school was destroyed and much of Hans Asperger's early work was lost. It was this event that arguably delayed the understanding of
autism spectrum conditions in the west.
Interestingly, as a child, Hans Asperger appears to have exhibited features of the very condition named after him. He was described as a
remote and
lonely child, who had difficulty making
friends. He was talented in
language; in particular he was interested in the Austrian poet
Franz Grillparzer, whose poetry he'd frequently quote to his uninterested classmates. He also liked to quote himself and often referred to himself from a third-person perspective.
Asperger died before his identification of this pattern of behavior became widely recognized, because his work was mostly in
German and barely
translated. The term "
Asperger's syndrome" was popularized in a 1981 paper by British researcher
Lorna Wing, which challenged the previously accepted model of
autism presented by
Leo Kanner in 1943. Unlike Kanner, Hans Asperger's findings were ignored and disregarded in the
English-speaking world in his lifetime. Finally, from the early
1990s, his findings began to gain notice, and nowadays
Asperger's Syndrome is recognized as a
condition in a large part of the world.
International Asperger's Day,
February 18, marks the anniversary of Hans Asperger's birth. International Asperger's Day was conceived by Asperger Services Australia.
One of Asperger's patients was Austrian writer and
Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Elfriede Jelinek.
Papers
Further Information
Get more info on 'Hans Asperger'.
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