ABSTRACT
The word ‘autism’ first appeared in the professional literature when Leo Kanner, a child psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, wrote a description of 11 children from his child psychiatric unit in 1943. These children were different from the others in his unit who were diagnosed with Childhood Schizophrenia. The children Kanner wrote about in his original paper had little interest in other people, peculiar language, an insistence on routines, and they displayed unusual body movements and repetitive behaviours.
