![]() ![]() ![]() Some were prodigies who couldn’t make it through school others were more disabled and were shunted into asylums. Over his many years at the Children’s Clinic in Vienna, Hans Asperger studied more than 200 children he would ultimately treat for what he called autistische Psychopathen (autistic psychopathy). ![]() The crucial difference is that Kanner had the fortune to publish his work in Baltimore, while Asperger had the misfortune to publish his in Nazi-controlled Vienna, and this accident of geopolitics lies at the tragic core of Silberman’s ambitious, meticulous and largehearted (if occasionally long-winded) history, “NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity.” and now autism, as the science journalist Steve Silberman informs us, identified separately by Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger. One can add to it sunspots, evolution, platinum, chloroform. The most fabled example is calculus, developed independently in two different countries by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, but the list stretches back centuries and unfurls right into the present. The history of science is studded with stories of simultaneous discovery, in which two imaginative souls (or more!) turn out to have been digging tunnels to the same unspoiled destination. ![]()
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