ABSTRACT
In 1943 Leo Kanner published “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact,” his groundbreaking article defining a new condition that he called autism. In 1944, unaware of Kanner’s work, Hans Asperger published “Autistic Psychopathy in Childhood” (“Die ‘Autistichen Psychopathen’ im Kindesalter”), describing a very similar condition and also giving it the name autism. Uta Frith notes the “remarkable coincidence” that Kanner, working at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and Asperger, at the University Paediatric Clinic, Vienna, “independently described exactly the same type of disturbed child to whom nobody had paid much attention before and both used the label autistic” (Autism and Asperger 6). Although the conditions they describe are at some points distinct, Kanner and Asperger are generally accepted as having traveled the same road: Asperger’s syndrome is now a subcategory of autism, afforded a place at the “higher functioning” end of what Lorna Wing designates the “autistic continuum” (111). Asperger himself, writing in 1979, commented on the “astonishing similarities within these two groups which accounted for the same choice of name” (qtd. in Wing 98).
