The term “Asperger’s” comes from Hans Asperger, an Austrian pediatrician who first described a distinct pattern of traits in children in the late 1930s and published his landmark paper on the topic in 1944. But the name didn’t enter mainstream medicine until decades later, when a British psychiatrist revived his forgotten work and proposed naming the condition after him. The story behind the term spans wartime Vienna, Cold War-era obscurity, a brief 19-year run as an official diagnosis, and a growing ethical reckoning.
Hans Asperger’s Original Observations
Hans Asperger (1906–1980) was a pediatrician working in Vienna when he first identified a group of children with a shared set of psychological traits. In a 1938 lecture, he used the term “autistic psychopaths” to describe them, borrowing the word “autistic” (meaning self-focused or withdrawn) from earlier psychiatric literature. The word “psychopathy” at the time referred broadly to personality differences, not the criminal connotation it carries today.
In 1944, Asperger published his comprehensive study as a postdoctoral thesis. He profiled four boys who shared what he called “a fundamental disturbance which manifests itself in their physical appearance, expressive functions and, indeed, their whole behaviour.” The children struggled deeply with social integration, often didn’t follow instructions, and could be restless and oppositional. But Asperger noted that in some cases these difficulties existed alongside “a high level of thought and experience.” He saw a spectrum within his own patients: some he considered capable of “great intellectual achievements,” while others he described as “bizarre, eccentric, and useless.” He believed these traits were rooted in genetics and that therapeutic education could achieve improvements only within predetermined limits.
Asperger’s paper, written in German, received almost no attention in the English-speaking world. For nearly four decades, it sat largely unread outside a small circle of German-language researchers.
How the Name Entered English
The term “Asperger’s syndrome” was coined in 1981 by Lorna Wing, a British psychiatrist and mother of an autistic daughter. Wing had discovered Asperger’s forgotten 1944 paper and recognized that the children he described didn’t fit neatly into the existing definition of autism established by Leo Kanner in 1943. Kanner’s autism emphasized severe language delays and intellectual disability. Asperger’s cases looked different: the children often had fluent speech and average or above-average intelligence but shared the same core difficulties with social interaction, communication, and imaginative flexibility.
Wing argued that Asperger’s cases and Kanner’s cases belonged to a single broader group of conditions. She proposed the name “Asperger’s syndrome” to distinguish this particular presentation, and her 1981 paper brought the concept to an English-speaking audience for the first time. The name stuck, and researchers across Europe and North America began studying and diagnosing it.
Becoming an Official Diagnosis
It took another 13 years for the medical establishment to formally adopt the term. In 1994, Asperger’s Disorder was included in the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), the reference guide used by clinicians in the United States. This was the first time autism was conceived as a spectrum of related disorders rather than a single condition. The DSM-IV grouped Autistic Disorder, Asperger’s Disorder, and a catch-all category called Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified under one umbrella.
The timing mattered. During the 1990s, reported rates of autism spectrum conditions rose dramatically, from roughly 1 to 4 per 10,000 children in the 1980s to 2 to 7 per 1,000 by the end of the decade. Much of that increase reflected broader diagnostic criteria and greater awareness, and the addition of Asperger’s as a recognized diagnosis played a direct role. People who had previously gone undiagnosed, or been labeled with other conditions, now had a name for their experience.
Why the Diagnosis Was Removed
Asperger’s had a short official lifespan. In 2013, the DSM-5 folded it into a single diagnosis: autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The rationale was straightforward. Clinicians and researchers had found that there weren’t enough reliable differences between Asperger’s, classic autism, and the other subcategories to justify keeping them separate. Autism was better understood as a continuous spectrum of traits, varying in intensity from person to person, rather than a set of distinct conditions with clear boundaries.
The World Health Organization followed the same path. Its International Classification of Diseases, 11th edition (ICD-11), replaced the separate categories of early childhood autism, atypical autism, and Asperger syndrome with the single term “autism spectrum disorder.” Today, neither major diagnostic system uses “Asperger’s” as a clinical label.
The Nazi-Era Controversy
The term carries another layer of history that has shaped how people feel about using it. Hans Asperger practiced medicine in Vienna during the Nazi occupation of Austria, and for decades the extent of his involvement with the regime was unclear. He had sometimes been portrayed as a defender of his patients, partly based on a line from his 1938 lecture in which he framed his work as being “from the standpoint of the abnormal children” rather than from the perspective of the state.
That narrative shifted dramatically in 2018, when historian Herwig Czech published an extensive investigation based on original records. Czech found that Asperger had participated in the Nazi regime’s system for evaluating disabled children. In 1942, Asperger served on a commission that screened over 200 residents of a children’s home near Vienna. Czech also documented the case of a young girl named Herta Schreiber, who was transferred to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic on Asperger’s authority. Am Spiegelgrund was part of the child “euthanasia” program, where children deemed unfit were killed. Herta died there two months after the transfer. Czech concluded that the records suggest Asperger “was willing to accept the killing of children.”
These findings intensified an already active debate about whether the term should continue to be used at all, even informally.
How the Term Is Used Today
Despite its removal from diagnostic manuals, “Asperger’s” remains widely used in everyday conversation. Many people who were diagnosed before 2013 still identify with the term, and it continues to appear in support groups, online communities, and casual speech. For some, it captures a specific experience within the autism spectrum that feels more precise than the broader ASD label.
Others have moved away from it, both because of the diagnostic changes and because of the historical revelations about Hans Asperger. The autistic community itself is divided on the question. Some people see the term as part of their identity and are reluctant to abandon it. Others prefer “autistic” or “on the autism spectrum” and view the shift as both scientifically accurate and ethically appropriate. There is no single consensus, and the language continues to evolve.