Hans Asperger

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Hans Asperger
A white-coated man in his thirties sits at a table across from a boy. He looks intently at the boy through his rimless glasses. His hair is cropped fairly short on the sides and is wavy on top. The boy, seated in the foreground with his back toward the viewer, sits straight up, with one arm resting on the arm of a wooden chair.

Asperger performing a psychological test on a child at the University Pediatric Clinic, Vienna, c. 1940.
Born February 18, 1906
Vienna, Austria–Hungary
Died October 21, 1980(1980-10-21) (aged 74)
Vienna
Education University of Vienna
Known for Writing on "autistic psychopathy"
Eponym of Asperger syndrome
Medical career
Profession Physician
Institutions University Children's Hospital, Vienna
Specialism Pediatrics
Research Autism

Hans Asperger (February 18, 1906 – October 21, 1980) 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 is regarded by some as under the fold of autism spectrum disorders, Asperger syndrome (AS) was named after him. Both Asperger's original paediatric diagnosis of autistic psychopathy and the eponymous diagnosis of AS that was named for him several decades after are controversial.

Personal life

Hans Asperger was born on a farm outside Vienna.[1] He was the elder of two sons. He had difficulty finding friends and was considered a lonely, remote child.[2][3] As a child, Asperger himself appeared to have exhibited features of the condition subsequently named after him. 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.[2]

Asperger studied medicine at the University of Vienna under Franz Hamburger[3][4] 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.[1] He married in 1935 and had five children.[2]

Career

During World War II, he was a medical officer, serving in the Axis occupation of Croatia; his younger brother died at Stalingrad.[2] 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.[5]

Asperger published a definition of autistic psychopathy in 1944 that was nearly identical with the definition published earlier by a Russian neurologist Grunya Sukhareva (Груня Ефимовна Сухарева) in 1926.[6][7] 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".[5] 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.[8] Another one of Asperger's patients was the Austrian writer and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, Elfriede Jelinek.[9]

In 1944, after the publication of his landmark paper describing autistic symptoms, he 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. 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.[1] He became professor emeritus in 1977, and died three years later. Asperger syndrome is named after him.[10]

Posthumous developments

Further information: History of Asperger syndrome

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.[11] 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".[12] Frith said that fundamental questions regarding the diagnosis had not been answered, and the necessary scientific data to address this did not exist.[13] 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",[14] and there is majority consensus to phase the diagnosis out of the American Psychiatric Association's diagnosis manual.[15]

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.[16]
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.[17]

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

Selected papers

  • 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 [Autistic psychopaths in childhood]". Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten (in German) 117: 76–136. doi:10.1007/BF01837709.  http://www.springerlink.com/content/u350x0683r1g6432/
  • 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 infantile autism]". Med Klin (in German) 69 (49): 2024–7. PMID 4444665. 
  • Asperger H (1977). "[The lived life. 50 years of pediatrics]". Padiatr Padol (in German) 12 (3): 214–23. PMID 331197. 

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "Whonameit biography". Retrieved 11/8/2010. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Lyons V, Fitzgerald M (2007). "Did Hans Asperger (1906–1980) have Asperger Syndrome?". J Autism Dev Disord 37 (10): 2020–1. doi:10.1007/s10803-007-0382-4. PMID 17917805. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Feinstein, Adam (2010). A History of Autism: Conversations with the Pioneers. John Wiley & Sons. p. 15. ISBN 978-1405186537. 
  4. ↑ Marcel Adam Just, Kevin A. Pelphrey, ed. (2013). Development and Brain Systems in Autism. Psychology Press. p. 15. ISBN 978-1848726406. 
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Anthony Attwood (1 October 1997). Asperger's Syndrome: A Guide for Parents and Professionals. Jessica Kingsley Publishers. p. 13. ISBN 978-1-85302-577-8. Retrieved 18 January 2013. 
  6. ↑ Nieminen-von Wendt, Taina 2004: On the origins and diagnosis of asperger syndrome: a clinical, neuroimaging and genetic study. The University of Helsinki. Page 10. http://ethesis.helsinki.fi/julkaisut/laa/kliin/vk/nieminen-wendt/
  7. ↑ Ssucharewa G. E. (1926). "Die schizoiden Psychopathien im Kindesalter". Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie 60: 235–261. 
  8. ↑ Asperger H (1944). "Die "Autistischen Psychopathen" im Kindesalter". Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 117: 132–135. 
  9. ↑ Meyer, V., Koberg, R.: Elfriede Jelinek: Ein Porträt. Rowohlt 2006, p. 32
  10. ↑ Echo Armman. "Hans Asperger". Autism-World. Retrieved 2007-03-20. 
  11. ↑ Wing L (1981). "Asperger's syndrome: a clinical account". Psychol Med 11 (1): 115–29. doi:10.1017/S0033291700053332. PMID 7208735. Retrieved 2007-08-15. 
  12. ↑ Baron-Cohen S, Klin A (2006). "What's so special about Asperger Syndrome?" (PDF). Brain Cogn 61 (1): 1–4. doi:10.1016/j.bandc.2006.02.002. PMID 16563588. 
  13. ↑ Frith, Uta (1991). Autism and Asperger Syndrome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-38608-X.  p. 2
  14. ↑ (F84.5)
  15. ↑ "299.80 Asperger's Disorder". DSM-5 Development. American Psychiatric Association. Retrieved 2010-12-21. 
  16. ↑ Asperger H; translated and annotated by Frith U (1991) [1944]. "'Autistic psychopathy' in childhood". In Frith U. Autism and Asperger syndrome. Cambridge University Press. pp. 37–92. ISBN 0-521-38608-X. 
  17. ↑ Eric Schopler (1998). "Premature Popularization of Asperger Syndrome". In Eric Schopler, Gery B. Mesibov and Linda J. Kunce. Asperger Syndrome or High-Functioning Autism?. Plenum Press. p. 388. ISBN 0-306-45746-6. 
  18. ↑ "International Asperger's Day" (Press release). Senator the Hon Jan McLucas. 2011-02-18. Retrieved 2012-04-28. 

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