[Deconstructing Kanner]

Kanner, in 1943, and Asperger, in 1944, published papers that have been considered the first descriptions of autism. Kanner is acknowledged as having been the first to recognise this condition, while Asperger is attributed with the identification of a milder form of autism which has been denominated Asperger's syndrome. Kanner's paper played an important role in the development of the conceptualisation of autism due to its being published in the United States, where it became popular in the field of child psychiatry. In contrast, Asperger's work, written in German during the period dominated by Nazism, was practically ignored until almost four decades later. A review of the historical data, mostly collected by Silberman, reveals that Kanner had first-hand knowledge of the work on autism that Asperger had begun ten years earlier. Moreover, on re-reading and analysing the pioneering publications it becomes clear that the contributions made by Asperger are still fully valid today, to the point of having intuited a complex polygenic aetiology and that it would fit in perfectly with autism spectrum disorder in the DSM-5.