2012).Īlthough attracting considerably less attention at the time, Hans Asperger’s report (Asperger 1944) of boys who had marked social difficulties, unusual circumscribed interests, and good verbal skills was also monumental. Presumably, these feral children had either been abandoned or run away from their parents, the latter being a problem still noted by families of children with autism today (Anderson et al. Kanner’s report was, of course, groundbreaking, but it is also important to note that even earlier descriptions of children who likely had autism were made in the 1800s in a training school for the intellectually disabled (Donvan and Zucker 2016) and in the 1700s with some reports of feral children (Candland 1995). To Kanner, these movements appeared to be ways for the child to maintain sameness in his/her world. The latter term also included some of the unusual stereotyped movements he noted such as body rocking and hand flapping. He emphasized two essential features of the condition: (1) autism-or severe problems in social interaction and connectedness from the beginning of life, and (2) resistance to change/insistence on sameness. Kanner ( 1943) described 11 children, 8 boys and 3 girls, who presented with “inborn autistic disturbances of affective contact”. Any discussion of the development of autism as a diagnostic concept inevitably starts with the work of Leo Kanner and his landmark observation in 1943 (Kanner 1943).

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