Joan E. Kain to Lauretta Bender, April 10, 1950, Box 5, Folder 1. Courtesy of the Brooklyn College Archives and Special Collections, The Papers of Dr. Lauretta Bender.
It is widely believed that the work of Austrian physician Hans Aspberger was unknown in Anglo-American professional circles until British autism researcher Lorna Wing reported on his 1944 article, “Autistic Psychopathy in Childhood,” in 1981 and coined the term Asperger syndrome, which became an official DSM diagnosis in 1994. Asperger’s article was finally translated into English by Uta Frith, a German-born autism researcher working at University College London, in 1991. This letter illustrates that Asperger had extensive contacts with leading American clinicians in 1950, almost 40 years earlier.
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