Hans Asperger

He got married in 1935 and had five children.

Hans Asperger died on October 21, 1980, in Vienna at the age of 74.

His birthday, February 18, has been declared International Asperger’s Day by various governments.

Hans Asperger was born on February 18, 1906, in Hausbrunn, Austria-Hungary. He had one younger brother.

He was a lonely child and had difficulty making friends. He developed an interest in languages and was particularly drawn towards the poetry of Franz Grillparzer. He was also good at the sciences.

He grew up to be an intelligent young man and studied medicine at the University of Vienna under Franz Hamburger. He graduated as a doctor of medicine in 1931.

Asperger became director of the play-pedagogic station of the special education section at the University Children’s Clinic in Vienna in 1932.

From 1934, he was affiliated with the psychiatric clinic in Leipzig. He had a special interest in ‘psychically abnormal’ children.

In 1943, he submitted a research paper to a journal. The basis of this research was his investigations on more than 400 children with autistic psychopathy.

In 1944, his definition of autistic psychopathy was published and this definition was quite similar with the definition given by a Russian neurologist Grunya Sukhareva in 1926.

According to him, the common features of autism include deficiency of sympathy towards other person, lack of proper communication skills and repetitive forms of behaviour. He termed these types of behaviour as ‘autistic psychopathy’. Here ‘autism’ meant ‘self’ and ‘psychopathy’ implied as ‘personality disease’.

Hans Asperger is best remembered for his work on “autistic psychopathy”. The Asperger syndrome (AS), an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), is named after him as he studied and described the symptoms of the disorder after researching on children in his practice.