What if Leo Kanner had drowned on September 4, 1937?

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On that date he nearly drowned when he fell off a railway bridge into the harbour during a visit to Halifax, Nova Scotia. He was rescued but if he had drowned what would have been the history of autism as a medical diagnosis?

His 1943 paper Autistic disturbances of affective contact would not have been published, but would another psychiatrist have identified autism as a diagnostic category? I think they would, but not for some years after Kanner. I know about Hans Asperger but his work was largely unknown in the English speaking world until the 1980s. I reckon that childhood schizophrenia would have continued to have been the diagnosis given to autistic children for a longer time than it actually was, and autistic adults would have been diagnosed with various other conditions.

Well then,

If he HAD died on that 'fateful day' there would be;

- Aspies
- Low functioning Aspies

Last edited by Blindspot149 on 11 Aug 2010, 1:13 am, edited 1 time in total.

there would be an 'Aspergers Syndrome' but it would have a completely different diagnosis and it would be connected to psychopathy

Nah, back then they just used "psychopathy" as a general word for mental disorder. "Autistic" was a symptom of schizophrenia.

So it's highly likely that we'd have autistics diagnosed as schizophrenic, and Asperger's not rediscovered at all (it wouldn't have been dug up by Lorna Wing if she hadn't known about autism), until the focus on neurology in the 1990s first came up with the term "non-verbal learning disorder".

So we'd probably be split between "mentally ret*d", "schizophrenic", and "NVLD". Possibly also "childhood-onset avoidant/schizoid personality"...

Unless someone else discovered autism, of course, which isn't all that unlikely; often times scientific discoveries become inevitable once the background information or technology is available to investigate them.

I don't think there'd be any difference at all, except that it would have a different name. Big ideas like that are usually floating in the cultural Zeitgeist at any given juncture in history and the person who gets the credit for it historically is just the first one to get press for it. There was a female psychiatrist who identified the same set of diagnostic criteria that Hans Asperger did, back in 1926, her work just fell by the wayside before it became an accepted diagnosis and the same thing very nearly happened to Asperger's work, too. But somebody would have gotten it into the journals eventually.

If Marconi hadn't gotten the credit for radio, Tesla would have (and probably should have), and barring that, Edison would have marketed the idea as his own. Somehow or other, these things bubble to the surface more or less just when they're supposed to.

I was just rewatching the movie 'What the [Bleep] Do We Know?' yesterday. I can't recommend it highly enough. I find its good to be reminded periodically just how much influence we exert over our own destinies without ever taking conscious responsibility for it.

Sula Wolff (researching about schizoid personality) discovered Asperger's work more or less at the same time that Lorna Wing.

Perhaps the course of history will be similar: instead of Wing creating the expression "Asperger's Syndrome" to avoid the prejudices against the word "autism", Wolff could have created the expression "Asperger's Syndrome" to avoid the prejudices against words beginning by "schizo-", and the only difference will be that the diagnostic criteria for AS will have also the item "unusual fantasy life" (Wolff was of the opinion that this point should be added to the criteria for AS).

Asperger's would most likely exist (nobody could be sure), and some other psychiatrist or psychologist most likely would have given a name to something that would have very similar diagnostic criteria to what is technically called classic autism or Kanner's autism. The word 'autism', after all, dates back to the early 20th century, and Asperger and Kanner both used the word to describe their patients without (as far as we know) Kanner knowing that Hans Asperger existed, and vice versa.
Nobody could ever know for sure, though.

Maybe it would be yet another subtype of schizophrenia. Goodness knows there are enough subtypes as it is, and often only loosely related. Go research catatonic schizophrenia sometime and see how many people think it's actually a movement disorder and not a schizophrenia subtype at all... And there's so much difference between the paranoid and disorganized subtypes... it's possible for them to share no symptoms at all and still have the same diagnosis...

Autism probably would have still gotten discovered but it be by another doctor but not in 1943. It might have had a different name instead. Autism used to be called Kanner's and now we don't use it anymore but autism had always been used.

I haven't studied this nearly enough to actually give a serious answer...

But I do love AUs!

So maybe we would have "autistic schizophrenics" complaining about how demeaning it was to share a diagnosis with paranoid schizophrenics, up until they got recognition enough for Asperger's Syndrome to enter the DSM as a "high-functioning form of schizophrenia" with diagnostic criteria requiring (in fancier shrink-terms, just to make it confusing):
Sensory issues (maybe motor issues as well)
Poor hygeine
Social isolation
Weird-sounding speech
No hallucinations or delusions
Criteria not met for another type of schizophrenia
Normal or above-normal intelligence
No delay in self-help skills, communication or stuff like that
Must not be due to a general medical condition; must actually be a problem

Then we'd have a bunch of what we would now call autistics misdiagnosed as having (this hypothetical universe's version of) Asperger's Syndrome when they had a delay in communication.

(Note that havoc would also have been played on the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia.)

There would still be the whole "we are Aspies and way better than you autistics" thing, only with schizophrenics instead of autistics.

Amanda Baggs would be arguing about schizophrenic trees. Why can't we live in a universe where The Oak Manifesto is about schizophrenic trees?