The History of “Asperger’s Syndrome”: Hans Asperger’s Research

Who was Hans Asperger? Why was his research on autism so important?

Hans Asperger was an Austrian physician who famously studied autistic individuals in the early 1900s. While some of his research has since been disproven and Asperger’s syndrome has been removed as a diagnosis, his research was important at the time.

Continue reading for a history of Asperger’s syndrome and Hans Asperger’s research.

The Beginning of Our Clinical Understanding of Autism

While we now have a broad understanding of many aspects of autism, this understanding is relatively new—prior to the mid-20th century, autism wasn’t identified as its own distinct disorder, and little research had been done on it. In this article, we’ll look at the origins of our clinical understanding of autism and the history of Asperger’s syndrome.

In his book NeuroTribes, Steve Silberman writes that the history of autism research began with the work of Austrian physician Hans Asperger in the 1930s and 1940s. Asperger believed that disabled children weren’t defective—as most people believed at the time—but simply had unique needs and strengths. (Shortform note: Recently uncovered historical evidence may suggest that Asperger believed otherwise.) He and the other staff at his clinic saw over 200 children, as well as many teenagers and adults, who demonstrated many of the traits of autism we described earlier. 

(Shortform note: The sample size of autistic children that Asperger worked with may be statistically problematic. Estimates suggest that approximately 1% of the global population is autistic. Assuming these rates were the same during the 1930s and 1940s, that would mean there were around 25 million autistic people in the world. Thus, a group of 200 subjects may not be enough to make substantial claims about the condition as a whole. However, Asperger’s observations were based on clinical casework, not experimental research. This means he had limited control over the patients he saw and would’ve been more focused on treating each individual than on developing comprehensive research.)

Through years of research and working with autistic people, Asperger concluded that autism is a relatively common disorder that encompasses a wide range of both ability and disability. He also concluded that it’s hereditary—often passing down from parent to child—and lifelong. And importantly, he noticed that it occurs along a wide spectrum; he suggested that every autistic person experiences a different type of autism.

(Shortform note: To more accurately capture the varied nature of autism and autistic people’s unique experiences, some neurodiversity advocates suggest an intersectional approach to our understanding of the condition. Intersectionality focuses on how a person’s experiences change when they belong to more than one marginalized group. Someone who’s autistic and also has a severe intellectual disability will have unique needs that someone else with only one of these conditions may not have. This is especially relevant in light of research that suggests that 95% of autistic people have at least one other co-occurring condition.)

According to Silberman, while prior research into autism primarily focused on deficits, Asperger noticed that many autistic people had unique skill sets and cognitive abilities. He called these skills and abilities “autistic intelligence.” He noticed that people in the sciences seemed particularly likely to show autistic traits, and he theorized that autism was more common in such fields because autistic intelligence often lent itself well to such work. Abstract reasoning, creative and novel thinking, and passionate interests are highly beneficial in science and may give autistic people an advantage over their allistic peers.

Asperger suggested that autistic people have always made important contributions to culture and human progress, and he argued vehemently in favor of their value as human beings.