Hans Asperger

Hans Asperger (1906-1980) was an Austrian pediatrician whose 1944 thesis on a group of boys with unusual social and intellectual profiles gave its name, after later rediscovery, to Asperger syndrome within the autism diagnostic family. Born in Hausbrunn near Vienna, the son of a farming family, he studied medicine at the University of Vienna and qualified in 1931.

He spent most of his career at the University Children's Hospital in Vienna, where he joined the curative education ward in 1932 and became its director in 1935. His 1944 habilitation thesis Die Autistischen Psychopathen im Kindesalter described four boys with intact language, narrow interests, motor clumsiness, and difficulty with social reciprocity, calling the pattern "autistic psychopathy." Published in wartime Vienna, the paper attracted little international attention for decades.

After the war he held the chair of pediatrics at the University of Vienna from 1962 and ran the Vienna Children's Hospital, publishing on a wide range of pediatric topics including curative education and child development. The British psychiatrist Lorna Wing brought his 1944 description back into the literature in a 1981 paper, proposing the eponymous label that entered formal diagnostic classifications in the 1990s.

Historical research published from 2018 by Herwig Czech and others, drawing on previously sealed archives, has documented his cooperation with the National Socialist child euthanasia program at the Am Spiegelgrund clinic, prompting an ongoing reassessment of his career and of the use of his name in diagnosis.

The given name Hans is a German short form of Johannes, from Hebrew Yochanan, meaning "Yahweh is gracious." He bore it through a contested medical legacy.