Who was Leo Kanner?: Unstrange Minds by Roy Richard Grinker

by Kristina Chew, PhD on October 7th, 2006

His name is familiar to everyone in Autismland—Leo Kanner, who first identified a group of American children he observed at the John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore as having “autism.” Kanner’s article “Autistic Disturbance of Affective Contact” describing these children was published in 1943; autism has sometimes been referred to as Kanner’s Syndrome.

Who was Leo Kanner, then?

An October 6th UPI article by journalist Lidia Wasowicz provides a basic overview over the history of autism. The article is Ped Med: A backward glance at autism and it presents a familiar narrative with reference to the 18th and 19th century term “idiot savant” and Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal of Raymond, an autistic man, in Rain Man.

But I want to know more. I need to know more about the history of autism, of what my son Charlie has, of who Leo Kanner, whose work and writings affect our lives everyday, was.

A book I have been reading provides this background, Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism by Roy Richard Grinker.

In Grinker’s book, Kanner is no longer a shadowy figure whose last name I have been mispronouncing for seven years (Kanner was Austrian; Kanner is pronounced like “Connor”). Kanner was born in a small village, Klekotow, to Orthodox Jewish parents, in 1894. His given name was Chaskel Leib Kanner and (as Grinker writes) he “hated the sound of the name Chaskel, a Yiddish version of Ezekiel” (p. 38). Kanner was just a bit taller than me (he was just over 5′ 2″). Kanner’s father “might well have been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome”—he was “socially awkward, obsessively dedicated to Talmudic Studies, and eager to absorb large amounts of useless information on just about anything in the world” (p. 39). Kanner’s first job in the United States was as an assistant physician at the State Hospital in Yankston, South Dakota (”a town not much larger than Klekotow,” Grinker notes (p. 40) ). Kanner’s mother was shot by the Nazis while she was napping in her rocking chair and three of Kanner’s sisters and their families were murdered in concentration camps. Only Kanner, his sister Dora, and his brother Wolf, survived. Grinker writes:

One wonders if Kanner’s commitment to helping the disabled and marginalized came, at least in part, from his hatred of the Nazis, who wanted to exterminate the sick and disabled—or, as the Nazis themselves called them, “life unworthy of life” (pp. 41-42)

Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism is forthcoming in January of 2007. I will be writing more about here, and learning what I need to know.

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