Hans Asperger Overview

Hans Asperger OverviewWhat Sister Viktorine KnewNeurotribes, neuodiversity, steve sibberman, autismIn 1931, Gottfried K. was brought to the Childrens Clinic at the University Hospital in capital of Austria by his grandmother for an examination. He was nine and a half historic period old, barely so physic bothy uncoordinated that Anne Weiss, a puppylike psychologist working at the clinic, assumed that he was feebleminded. His grandmother told Weiss that she too was often rugged by his behavior, but Gottfried was clever and smart. Weiss listened carefully, taking nones. His grandmother had brought him to the right place. She looked in front to controverting this case with her colleagues, e redundantly Hans Asperger, the new pediatrician who seemed to take a special interest in gifted, sensitive children.Hans Asperger, the eldest of three boys, was born in Austria in 1906. But his brothers died young, and he became the only child. In his early life, he joined a group of young p eople who called themselves the Wandering Scholars, head teacher off on month long hiking trips to read poetry obstreperously in the wilderness. He met his wife-to-be, Hanna Kalmon, on one of these trips.after graduating from the University of Vienna, Asperger was assigned by his wise man, Franz Hamburger, to the Childrens Clinic at the University Hospital.The University Hospital was one of the most honored hospitals in the city. Doctors from all over Europe came to the city to observe surgeries in vast run theaters and consult with the leading experts in the field. Since the mid 1910s, Vienna had hosted ongoing salons where physicians and scientists mingled with artists and musicians to discuss politics, art, lore, and philosophy. Much of this cultural ferment originated in Viennas lively Judaic community, which date back to the 12th century. In the years after the World struggle I, one in five inhabitants of the city was Jews, as were m all of the ability members who taugh t at the university.The Childrens Clinic was founded by a physician and social reformer named Erwin leper. By combining elements of medicine, psychology, and progressive pedagogy, Lazar developed an approach to helping children enter upon their potential based on the 19th century concept of Heilpdagogik, healing(predicate) education.The tight-knit round at the special-education unit, kn confess as the Heilpdagogik displace, included Asperger, Weiss, head-shrinker Georg Frankl, psychologist Josef Feldner, and a nun named Sister Viktorine Zak. Their approach to diagnosis was based on a method of intensive observation developed by Lazar. Lazar believed a childs true condition could only be measured by watching the child in the course of his or her daily life. set children with a battery of tests was not enough. No one master this inti checkmate style of observation better than Georg Frankl, who had become Aspergers chief diagnostician.On his premiere day at the hospital, Gottfr ied did nothing but cried. But he adapted to his new life gradually. The reliable rhythms of the daily schedule seemed to pouffe him. As Weiss got to know him better, she came to see the nine-year-old Gottfried was advancedly smart, but he was unconscious(predicate) of things that most kids know instinctively. He didnt know how to play the games around him to his own advant suppurate. Weiss published her in-depth case study of Gottfried in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry in 1935 after she emigrated to America in 1934.***Over the course of a decade, Asperger and his staff examined over two hundred children who displayed the same ball of social awkwardness, precocious abilities, and fascination with rules, laws, and schedules. They also saw several teenagers and bounteouss who fit the same profile. Asperger believed they equal a distinct syndrome that was not at all rare but had somehow escaped the notice of his predecessors.In fact a Russian psychiatrist named Grunia Su khareva had written about a similar group of young people with prodigious abilities in art and music two decades former in Moscow. She believed her patients had a disorder resembled schizophrenia with an essential difference. While adult schizophrenics always deteriorated, her patients often made dramatic improvements. She called this syndrome schizoid personality disorder.though Asperger was unaware of Sukharevas work, he noted his patients condition was similar to the condition referred to as autistic view by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler. In 1908, Bleuler employ the term autistic to describe a schizophrenic patient who had recede into his own world. Asperger used the term autistic psychopathy to describe their condition.In a postgraduate thesis, Asperger described prototypal cases named Fritz V., Harro L., Ernst K,. And Hellmuth L. Asperger was struck by these boys inherent aptitude for science. He recognized that his patients blatant disregard for authority could be developed into the skepticism indispensable to any scientist. He called this distinctive cluster of aptitudes, attitudes, skills, and abilities autistic intelligence. His job as the staff of the Heilpdagogik Station was to teach these kids how to ramble their autistic intelligence to work. He called them his little professors.Asperger noted that many of these kids fathers and grandfathers were engineers and scientists, screening that the disorder might be genetic. But he cautioned that it would be inadvisable to search for a single gene responsible for such a complex figure of behaviors and traits as these conditions were undoubtedly polygenetic.When Asperger submitted his thesis to Hamburger in 1943, the Nazis had occupied Austria five years earlier. Of the 200 senior members of the checkup faculty, less than 50 remained. Aspergers colleagues, Anni Weiss and Georg Frankl, had fled the country, and many others were in exile, im prisoned in concentration camps, or dead of suici de. Asperger was speaking out for the sake of children who had not yet been remove by a monstrous idea of eugenics imported from America.***The word eugenics (which government agency well-born) was coined in 1887 by a British named Francis Galton, the younger half full cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton distinguished himself by his ability to recognize patterns. He popularized the notion of reverse toward the mean in statistical analysis and the use of fingerprints in the science of forensics.Eugenics policies were premier(prenominal) implemented in the United States. In 1909, the state of atomic number 20 passed a law granting public-health officials the right to sterilize convicts and the rational patients in California. cardinal other states had passed similar laws, and a wave of sterilization swept through with(predicate) asylums and prisons coast to coast.In October 1921, the Second International Congress of Eugenics was held as a gala week long event at the American Mu seum of cancel History in Manhattan, New York. The event was sponsored by the nations most prestigious museums and promoted in journals like Science and the Scientific Monthly. In the welcome grapple to the congress, Henry Fairfield Osborn, the museums president, urged his clotheshorse scientists to enlighten government in the prevention of the cattle ranch and multiplication of worthless members of society, the spread of feebleemindedness, of idiocy, and of all moral and intellectual as well as physical diseases.As influential as they were at home, American eugenicists received an even warmer welcome in Germany. A 1913 textbook by Geza von Hoffman called Die Rassenhygiene in den Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika (Racial Hygiene in the United States) became the seminal guide to applied eugenics students in Germany.Incarcerated in the Landsberg guard in 1924, Adolf Hitler learned about eugenics from The Passing of the Great Race, written by a Yale graduate named Madison Grant. Grant mentioned that Galtons strategies for encouraging men and women of the genius-producing classes to mate would not stop the rising tide of idiocracy. He directed his fellow eugenicists to develop to a greater extent expeditious means of eliminating the weak and the unfit. It was music to Hitlers ears. From his prison in Landsberg, Hitler dictated Mein Kampf to his de directy Rudolf Hess saying that as a gentle defense of the lives of children yet unborn, the future Fhrer put forced sterilization at the core of his vision of a new society.As the case Socialist party rose to power in the 1930s, the body of American eugenic law became the blueprint for Nazi policies to defend Aryan from ban genetic influences. Unlike their American counterparts, German eugenicists did not plan to settle their efforts to asylums, prisons, and mental institutions. Instead, they aimed to broadcast out the implications of eugenic theory to their fullest extent. In July 1933, they enacted the fai rness for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring to sterilize any German citizen who showed signs of schizophrenia, alcoholism, bipolar disorder, Huntingtons disease, inherited blindness or deafness, or epilepsy.In June 1934, the Nazis assassinate the Fascist Chancellor Engelbert Dolfuss and replaced him with a pro-German and anti-Semitic successor.By 1935, a extensive exodus from Austria was under way, prompted by new laws stripping Jews of property, jobs, and basic rights of citizenship. Anni Weiss was the first of Aspergers team to leave, arriving in America in 1934. The clinics gifted diagnostician, Georg Frankl, left in 1937, emigrating to Maryland with the aid of a Jewish doctor who had left Austria years earlier.On March 12, 1938, the day of the Anschluss, Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany. Gangs of civilians calling themselves Rolllkommandos steal department stores and shops in the Jewish quarter, often assisted by the police. at bottom weeks, the University o f Vienna was transformed into the intellectual center of an academic movement to put racial improvement and racial research at the top of the medical agenda. Before the Anschluss, more than than 5,000 physicians were practicing in Vienna, by the fall of 1938, less than 750 would remain. umteen former professors at the university died in concentration camps. Others took their own lives. In 1938, Aspergers mentor Franz Hamburger gave a whip to the society titled National fabianism and Medicine, affirming his support of the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring.On October 3, Asperger gave the first public talk on autism in history, in a lecture hall at the University Hospital. He launched into the case histories of his patients, putting his audience on familiar turf. Then he proposed a radical way of thinking about cognitive disabilities that is opposite to the dogma of racial hygiene. He verbalise the therapeutic goal must be to teach the person how to tire ou t their difficulties, not to eliminate them. Unfortunately, his strategy of accentuating the positive to his Nazi superiors by basing his quaternary prototypical cases on his chatty little professors rather than on the more profoundly impaired children he saw in the institutes, would contribute to far-flung confusion in the coming decades. On the basis of the four prototypical boys in Aspergers thesis, many clinicians assumed that he saw only extremely functioning children in his practice, which ended up obscuring his most important baring that autism was found in all age groups, and had a broad range of manifestations.That night was the beginning of Yom Kippur, the most sacred day in the Jewish calendar. For the next 24 hours, storm troopers and Rollerkommandos made brutal raids in the Jewish neighborhood, stealing, burning, plundering, and killing. A month later, on Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, ninety-five synagogues in Vienna went up in flames, and Jewish homes, h ospitals, schools, and shops were demolished with sledgehammers. In Berlin, more than thirty thousand Jews were dragged off to concentration camps.Meanwhile, Aspergers old colleague, Erwin Jekelius, was rising through the party ranks and became the director of Am Spiegelgrund (formerly known as Am Steinhof), the largest mental hospital in Vienna. He was later called the mass murderer of Steinhof when he helped the Nazis started their mercy killing program. In 1941, Hitler arrested him when he fell in love with Hitlers sister, Paula Hitler. After a brief stint in jail, Jekelius was drafted into the army and sent to the Russian front, where he was captured by the Red Army soldiers. He died at the age of forty, from cancer of the urinary bladder.***On February 20, 1939, a boy named Gerhard Kretschmar was born in Leipzig. He was born blind and intellectually disabled, with one arm and only a partial leg, and he was prone to seizures. The birth of Gerhard Kretschmar provided an opportun ity that Hitler had been time lag for since his days in Landsberg prison. Hitler dispatched his personal physician to examine the child and gave orders to carry out euthanasia.In August, the Committee for the Registration of Severe Hereditary Ailments issued a decree calling for the registration of all children born with congenital abnormalities of any kind. Doctors and midwives were required to authorship all cases to the committee.On September 1, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, formally starting World War II. In December, Hitler signed a sequestered order authorizing the creation of a program call Aktion T-4, short for Tiergartenstrasse 4, the get across of the Charitable Foundation for Curative and Institutional Care in Berlin. unopen door meetings were held throughout Germany and Austria to educate medical students about child euthanasia and T-4, which primarily targeted disabled adults. These programs became fertile ground for medical research that could not have been conduct ed in contexts where the patient was expected to live. More than 200,000 disabled children and adults were bump off through these official programs, and thousands more were killed by doctors and nurses on their own initiative.***Asperger had never joined the Nazi party, according to his daughter, because of his loyalty to the Wandering Scholars. He refused to report his young patients to the Reich Committee, which created a dangerous situation for him. The Gestapo had showed up twice at his clinic to arrest him. Both times, Franz Hamburger had used his power as a prominent Nazi party member to intervene in his favor.By then, the Reich needed doctors on the front lines, and Asperger was drafted into the German army to serve as surgeon in a field hospital in Croatia. In September 1944, while Asperger was still in Croatia, the Allies bombed the Childrens Clinic, reducing the Heilpdagogik Station to rubble. As the ceiling gave way, Sister Viktorine threw her arms around one of her boys to hold dear him. They were buried together.