Leo Kanner (; born Chaskel Leib Kanner, ; June 13, 1894 – April 3, 1981) was an Austrian-American psychiatrist, physician, and social activist best known for his work related to infantile autism. Before working at the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Kanner practiced as a physician in Germany and South Dakota. In 1943, Kanner published his landmark paper Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact, describing 11 children who displayed "a powerful desire for aloneness" and "an obsessive insistence on persistent sameness." He named their condition "early infantile autism". Kanner was in charge of developing the first child psychiatry clinic in the United States and later served as the Chief of Child Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He is one of the co-founders of The Children's Guild, a nonprofit organization serving children, families and child-serving organizations throughout Maryland and Washington, D.C., and dedicated to "Transforming how America Cares for and Educates its Children and Youth." He is widely considered one of the most influential American psychiatrists of the 20th century.
Biography Early life Leo Kanner was born as Chaskel Leib Kanner in Klekotów, Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (present day Klekotiv, Ukraine) on June 13, 1894, to Abraham Kanner and Clara Reisfeld Kanner. In this area, approximately 70% of the total population was of Jewish descent. Kanner despised his given names, "Chaskel", which is the Yiddish version of "Ezekiel", and "Leib", instead choosing to go by "Leo". Growing up in a traditional Jewish household, Kanner received both a religious and a secular education. Kanner spent the first years of his life in Klekotów with his family and was brought up according to Jewish tradition and custom.
In 1906, Kanner was sent to Berlin to live with his uncle. Later, the rest of his family followed. At a young age, Kanner appreciated the arts and wanted to pursue a career as a poet; unfortunately, he was not able to get his works published. In 1913, Kanner graduated from the Sophien-Gymnasium, a public state high school in Berlin, where he excelled in the sciences. He then passed the graduating Staatsexamen exam in 1919 and enrolled at the University of Berlin medical school. However, Kanner's medical education was interrupted during World War I, when he was recruited to serve in the Austro-Hungarian Army in the medical service of the 10th Infantry Regiment. After the war, Kanner went back to medical school in Berlin and officially received his medical degree in 1921. Later that year, Kanner married June Lewin, with whom he would eventually have two children: Anita (born in 1923) and Albert (born in 1931).
Early career After graduating medical school, Kanner worked as a cardiologist at the Charité Hospital in Berlin. Kanner began doing work with normal heart sound to the relationship of the electrocardiogram. At that time, the atmosphere at the Charité clinics and institutes inspired rapid progress in science, teaching and patient care. The Charité, situated in the middle of Berlin, attracted students, physicians and scientists from all over the world, resulting in a group of outstanding personalities and renowned clinicians.
Motivated by the post-war hyperinflation and poor economic conditions of Weimar Germany, Kanner immigrated to the United States in 1924. If he had stayed in Germany his fate might have been similar to other Jewish professionals who lost their lives during the war. He stated: "Little did I know, if I had remained in Germany I would have been perished by Hitler in the Holocaust".
When he emigrated to the United States in 1924, he worked at the state hospital in Yankton, South Dakota, where he started his pediatric and psychiatric studies. Upon arrival, Kanner was appointed assistant physician at the Yankton State Hospital. It was there Kanner would learn the subtleties of pediatrics and psychiatry, two fields in which he was not experienced. To enhance his command of the English language, Kanner did the crossword puzzles in The New York Times. During his time in South Dakota, Kanner published his first works, which were on general paralysis and syphilis. Kanner also studied the effects of adrenalin on the blood pressure of patients with functional paralysis. Additionally, he published his first book, Folklore of the Teeth, an analysis of dental practices around the world in relation to customs and folklore, in 1928.
Career at the Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Hospital After serving four years in South Dakota, Kanner attained a fellowship position at the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland in 1928, after attracting the attention of Adolf Meyer who was the Psychiatrist-in-Chief and Director of the psychiatric clinic. In 1930, with monetary support from the Macy and Rockefeller Foundations, Meyer and Edward A. Park were able to establish the Children's Psychiatry Service at the Harriet Lane Home at Johns Hopkins, which was the first child psychiatry clinic in the United States, and appointed Kanner to develop the program. Despite his inexperience in the fields of pediatrics and child psychiatry, Kanner was able to teach himself pediatric psychiatry. In 1933, Meyer promoted Kanner to associate professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University. In 1935 the first edition of his textbook, Child Psychiatry was published. This was the first English language textbook on child psychiatry.
Beyond his revolutionary clinical research, Kanner's concern for the mentally ill manifested as social activism for which he is also remembered today. In the 1930s, a group of lawyers and judges arranged for 166 state-institutionalized, mentally ill residents to be released and assigned as unpaid domestic servants for affluent families around Baltimore. The release of these patients was justified through the Habeas Corpus writs and the claim to familial rights. Out of his own concern, Kanner decided to track down the 166 patients and found them plagued with a variety of dreadful outcomes such as STDs, tuberculosis, prostitution, imprisonment, institutionalization, and even death. Kanner reported that the 166 released patients had a total of 165 children, many of whom became orphans or died due to neglect. Kanner's report on these patients, "Scheme to Get Morons to Work in Homes Free Charged", made the headlines of The Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post in 1938. The publicity helped spark community action and led to the better treatment of the mentally ill. Apart from his social activism for the mentally ill, during the run-up to World War II, Kanner was instrumental in rescuing hundreds of Jewish physicians from the horrors of the Nazis by relocating them to work in the United States. He and his wife opened their home to many of these European refugees.
Beginning in 1938, Kanner observed eleven of his patients and chronicled the lives and behavioral characteristics of the children in his seminal paper, "Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact", published in 1943. In this landmark publication, Kanner describes these children, all born in the 1930s, as living very disparate lives, but appearing to share something he labeled as "infantile autism", which is now simply known as autism. Later on, Kanner served as the Chief of Child Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins until his retirement from the position in 1959 and attaining the position of Emeritus. He was replaced by Leon Eisenberg. After retirement, Kanner continued to publish papers regarding autism until 1973. Moreover, he served as a visiting professor at Stanford University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Minnesota, and ran an active consulting practice until a few years before his passing.
Research
Studies of autism Kanner expressed a great deal of concern about the usual mistreatment of neurodivergent children. He expressed concern about a society where 'intellectual haves' look down on the 'intellectual have-nots', which led many to look down on the child with intellectual disability as an object of adult manipulations rather than as a human being who reacts to affection and hostility, to acceptance and rejection, to approval and disapproval, to patience and irritability as any other child would. This led to his major work in 1943, "Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact", published in 1943. In this paper, Kanner characterizes eleven cases, 3 girls and 8 boys, and would later call his observations 'autism'.
Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact (1943) Published in the journal Nervous Child, "Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact" was one of the most cited papers on autism in the twentieth century. In his landmark paper, Kanner took the term "autism", which Eugen Bleuler previously attributed to the inward, introspective symptoms typical in adult schizophrenia patients, and labeled the eleven children in his study as having "infantile autism." However, rather than relating his observations to the qualities and symptoms seen in schizophrenic adults, Kanner classified his description of "autism" to be independent from the psychotic disorder of schizophrenia, explaining how autism was not a precursor to schizophrenia, and that the symptoms of autism appeared evident and present at birth and early life. A significant work, this paper on "Kanner Syndrome" formed the basis for later research conducted by Kanner and others on what later became known as childhood autism spectrum disorder.
From 1938, Kanner began to study a group of eleven young children (eight boys and three girls) who came to see him at his clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. For each of the cases, Kanner provides a detailed account of the symptoms, health, results of diagnostic tests, familial background, and future development and progression of the children. Adding to his own observations, Kanner further contextualized the lives of his patients by including typically epistolary inputs from family members and other individuals with whom the children interacted. Generally, all of the children shared certain core symptoms and came from similar socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds (all but two of the families were of Anglo-Saxon descent). The following are summaries of each of the eleven cases: