Hans Asperger was an Austrian pediatrician, psychiatrist, and physician known for having raised a variant within the autism spectrum that would later bear his name , Asperger’s syndrome. Born in the Austrian capital in 1906 and being the eldest of two brothers, he began medical studies at the University of Vienna and graduated in 1931 with the intention of specializing in pediatrics and, more specifically, in curative pedagogy to assist children and youth with special needs .
It was precisely at this time, working at the University Children’s Hospital in Vienna, that he developed his doctoral thesis based on the study of the behavior of four children with similar characteristics . All of them seemed to show, in Asperger’s own words, “lack of empathy, little ability to form friendships , one-way conversations, intense absorption by special interest and clumsy movements.” The pediatrician called these children “little teachers” due to the great intelligence and mastery they showed on a specific subject that resulted from their personal interest. Partially contradicting the theories of Leo Kanner , father of Autism Spectrum Disorder, Asperger differentiated a variant within it and classified it as ‘autistic psychopathy’. His thesis was published in 1944 in German .
It would not be until 1981, a year after Asperger’s death, when Lorna Wing would take up the Austrian pediatrician’s research and use the term ‘Asperger’s syndrome’ for the first time to refer to this variant of autism in which intellectual capacity and language skills seem superior. The name would spread rapidly and the centenary year of Hans Asperger’s birth would be declared the International Year of Asperger’s Syndrome .
The image that comes to us of Hans Asperger, although with few historical documents to support it , has been that of a man committed to science and to the little ones. It is considered that he was a strong opponent of Nazi ideology and that during and after the war he directed an institution for children with special needs and the pediatric department of the University Hospital of Vienna for years. However, a recent study published in the journal ‘ Molecular Autism ‘ offers a completely different version of the story.
Herwig Czech’s research provides personal documents from Hans Asperger showing that the doctor collaborated with the Nazi regime and actively participated in the euthanasia of dozens of troubled children at the Spiegelgrund Institution in occupied Austria . The bulk of Asperger’s work was developed during the Nazi occupation and his popularity at the time is due to the sympathy he showed for the ideology of National Socialism and for some of its main leaders.
Referencia: Herwig Czech. ‘Hans Asperger, National Socialism, and “race hygiene” in Nazi-era Vienna’, Molecular Autism (2018). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13229-018-0208-6.
