But he praises Asperger's courage in speaking to the Nazis. Silberman shies away from using the terms high-functioning and low-functioning, because "both of those terms can be off base," he says. Steve Silberman's articles have been published in Wired, The New Yorker, Nature and Salon. Along the way, he revisits Asperger's calculated efforts to save his patients. Silberman chronicles the history of autism and examines some of the myths surrounding our current understanding of the condition in his new book, NeuroTribes. "That is where the idea of so-called high-functioning versus low-functioning autistic people comes from really - it comes from Asperger's attempt to save the lives of the children in his clinic," science writer Steve Silberman tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. Asperger was speaking to an audience of Nazis, and he feared that his patients - children who fell onto what we now call the autism spectrum - were in danger of being sent to Nazi extermination camps.Īs Asperger spoke, he highlighted his "most promising" patients, a notion that would stick with the autistic spectrum for decades to come. In 1938, an Austrian pediatrician named Hans Asperger gave the first public talk on autism in history. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1 in 68 children has an autism spectrum disorder.
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