Brockie: The hideous side of Hans Asperger

brilliant career as a psychologist and medical specialist, Hans Asperger, professor of psychology at the University of Vienna, died in 1980.

From the 1930s, Asperger made himself a name as pediatrician, specializing in children's mental disorders He discovered that children and adults with severe autism were clumsy, clumsily communicating with others, had poor eye contact, facial expressions, and limited body could not appreciate the feelings of others. Many autistic adults had obsessive or repetitive routines or interests and were blind in fashion.

In the 1940s, Asperger developed a scale of autism ranging from serious "autistic psychopathy" to a much lighter form that he defined as a distinct condition.

He gained a great reputation in Europe but, because most of his work was published in German, he was little known to the English-speaking world.

Anglophone clinical psychologists discovered Asperger only after his death. They thought of him so well that they called the softer version of autism after him in the 1990s, calling him Asperger's Syndrome.

Today, more than 30 million people worldwide are considered to have this disease

. A new book entitled Asperger's Children the Californian Edith Sheffer reveals a dark and hideous side to Hans Asperger

In the 1930s, the Nazis began to purify the Aryan race. All doctors, nurses and midwives were required to report any child with mental or physical disabilities, to be sent to 37 "Children & Wards".

As head psychologist at a children's district in Vienna, Asperger sorted the children mentally or physically. disabilities according to criteria such as genetic inferiority, uneducable, unemployable, unworthy of life, incapable of social compliance, or too difficult to manage for parents.

His signature was a death sentence for hundreds of these children.

the publication of Sheffer's cooling book, many feel uncomfortable using the name Asperger. There is a movement for his name to disappear from the psychologist's vocabulary.

There is a moral here for clinicians: Make sure that a compassionate heart beats under your white coat.

❑ Edith Sheffer, Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna .

                
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