ABSTRACT
In a very real sense, the history of autism is a recent one. The word ‘autism’ comes from the Greek autos, meaning self, and was first used by Eugen Bleuler in 1908, subsequently appearing in his published work in 1911. Bleuler was a Swiss psychiatrist who also coined the term ‘schizophrenia,’ and his understanding of autism was not as we would recognize it today but rather as a kind of non-logical thought that formed part of his wider research around the emerging ideas of dementia and the schizophrenic mind. Autism as we currently understand it dates from the late 1930s and early 1940s and the work of psychiatrists Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger who, independently of one another and on different continents, used the word to describe some of the children they studied in their own clinical research.
