A Short History of the Woman Who First Defined Autism
Hey, I would like to send an important message to all of my fellow autistics on this website. It turns out that there was a woman who studied and properly defined what autism was about twenty years before Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger did, yet she’s not getting nearly enough credit for her research and is largely unknown here in the West.
Her name is Grunya Efimovna Sukhareva.
Dr. Sukhareva was a Ukrainian child psychologist who was born on November 11th, 1891, and died on April 26, 1981.
In 1925, she published a vividly detailed description of what she referred to as “autistic” traits in the behavior of several boys. Her paper was translated to German, but never got an English translation until 1996. She firmly (and correctly) believed that autism was rooted in brain development, and was even one of the first people to separate the condition from schizophrenia, which was something that the DSM-5 did not officially do until the 1980’s.
Now mind you, her findings were published over a decade before either Dr. Leo Kanner or Dr. Hans Asperger knew of her paper. While it’s still unknown whether Kanner had ever read her paper, there is evidence that Asperger may have used some of her observations for his paper without crediting her, as it had been translated into German at the time. The reason for leaving her uncredited could possibly have been because doing so in Nazi-occupied Austria would have gotten him arrested considering he’d be using the research of a Jewish woman, but I digress.
Dr. Sukhareva dedicated her life to helping children with mental disorders, and I feel awful that I never knew about this until I saw a random old article pop up on my search engine tab. She had claimed that her goal when working with these children was to help them “stay connected with real life, its tempo and movement,” to help them adapt to the world instead of trying to cure them like most other medical professionals did, and yet we had to have our disorder be named after a Nazi who had supported the euthanization of children...
Anyway, here’s the article where I found this information. It’s a good read, and even goes into some detail about two other leading researchers of ADS that Kanner had ripped off.