History Of Autism Science

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) might seem to be a fairly new condition, yet written evidence of its existence can be found as far back as the 1700s. The word Autism was coined after the word Autismus in 1910 by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler; however, he applied the word to describe schizophrenia. The word was in turn derived from a Greek word, autos, meaning “self”. Once the condition we now know as autism was discovered in 1938, it was labeled with Bleuler’s word because the children described seemed absorbed in themselves and cut off from the people around them.

In 1938, Hans Asperger, a pediatrician at the University Children's Hospital in Vienna, used the term “autistic psychopaths” for the children he was studying. The condition was later called Asperger syndrome, and since DSM-5 in 2013 it has been part of autism spectrum disorder. In 1981 Lorna Wing's paper brought the term Asperger syndrome into wide use. It became a separate diagnosis in ICD-10 (1992) and DSM-IV (1994).

In 1943, a psychiatrist from Johns Hopkins University, Leo Kanner, used the term autism in the modern sense. He called it early infantile autism. It came about during his observation of 11 children who displayed similar symptoms. He described their “autistic aloneness” and their “insistence on sameness”.

Unfortunately, in studying children with autism, Kanner mentioned that there appeared to be a “lack of warmth” among many fathers and mothers of the children he was studying. In a 1949 paper, he hypothesized that autism might be caused by “a genuine lack of maternal warmth”. As a result, the 1950s and early ’60s were dark times for parents of children with autism. The accepted theory was that autism was the result of cold and uncaring parenting by “Refrigerator Mothers”. Autism was seen as a psychological disorder caused by traumatic childhood experiences or a lack of care from the parents.

During the ’60s, Dr. Bernard Rimland and Dr. Eric Schopler dispelled the “refrigerator mother” myth and showed that autism in children is not caused by poor parenting but rather a neurobiological malfunction. It straightened the misconception that parents are directly responsible for a child’s autism.

Up to this day, there is still no scientifically proven single cause of autism.