History

A Brief History About Autism

As early as the late eighteenth century, medical texts had started to describe cases of children who did not speak, were extremely aloof, and who possessed unusual memory skills. Although, it was not until 1943 that the condition was given a name. Dr. Leo Kanner, a child psychiatrist at John Hopkins University Medical School, described the common characteristics of 11 children he had studied between 1938 and 1943. These children several features, but the one that stood out the most was the fact that they all withdrew themselves from human contact and isolated themselves from any other human being as early as the first year of life. So convinced was Kanner that autism was present from birth or shortly after it, that he adopted the term "early infantile autism". Today, professionals rarely use the term "infantile autism" and "early infantile autism".

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