NeuroTribes: Heilpädagogische Station

Hans Asperger

Hans Asperger worked in the Children’s Clinic in the University of Vienna Hospital. This was no ordinary clinic, and author Steve Silberman argues that it was a century ahead of its time. It was created in 1911 by a doctor, Erwin Lazar, who, instead of seeing children with special educational needs as being "broken" or as having an "illness," saw them as needing different teaching methods more suited to their own learning styles.

Lazar’s progressive pedagogy was based on the 19th-century concept of Heilpädagogik, or "therapeutic education," and his special education unit was known as the Heilpädagogische Station. Hans Asperger worked there with Sister Viktorine using art, drama, music, literature and nature study. The antithesis of a custodial institution, it was a place where children and teenagers could discover their potential.

Asperger coined the term Autistische Psychopathen (autistic psychopathy) or Autismus for short to describe the children in his special education unit. In them he saw children with the minds of geniuses, eccentrics, obsessed with their special interests, some with amazing memories who could recall all the routes of the Viennese tramlines, others who could perform rapid arithmetical calculation, and others with profound learning difficulties. 

When he submitted his thesis describing these children in 1943, he argued that many of them had a natural aptitude for science, for example giving a portrait of a child who was obsessive with performing chemistry experiments at home. He saw them as potential innovators, seeing the world with a fresh perspective, and called them his "little professors." While he recognized how broad the autism spectrum was, he emphasised their special talents, not their "degenerate defects."

Professor Asperger gave the first ever public lecture on autism on October third, 1938, in a lecture hall in the University Hospital. He declared, "Not everything that steps out of the line, and is 'abnormal,' must necessarily be 'inferior.’" 

Hans Asperger