Isabelle Rapin who advanced the concept of the Spectrum dead

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Isabelle Rapin, a Swiss-born child neurologist who helped establish autism’s biological underpinnings and advanced the idea that autism was part of a broad spectrum of disorders, died on May 24 in Rhinebeck, N.Y. She was 89.

The cause was pneumonia, said her daughter Anne Louise Oaklander, who is also a neurologist.

“Calling her one of the founding mothers of autism is very appropriate,” said Dr. Thomas Frazier II, a clinical psychologist and chief science officer of Autism Speaks

In his autobiography, “On the Move: A Life” (2015), Dr. Sacks wrote: “Isabelle would never permit me, any more than she permitted herself, any loose, exaggerated, uncorroborated statements. ‘Give me the evidence,’ she always says.”

In a short biography written for the Journal of Child Neurology in 2001, Dr. Rapin recalled a critical moment in her work on autism. “After evaluating hundreds of autistic children,” she wrote, “I became convinced that the report by one-third of parents of autistic preschoolers, of a very early language and behavioral regression, is real and deserving of biologic investigation.”

Along the way, she helped debunk the myth that emotionally cold mothers were to blame for their children’s autism, and advocated early educational intervention for autistic children, with a focus on their abilities, not their disabilities. She also popularized the use of the term “autism spectrum disorder,” which refers to a wide range of symptoms and their severity.

“She would never let us say that autism is a single disorder,” Dr. Mark Mehler, chairman of the department of neurology at Einstein, said in an interview. “She always said there were a thousand different causes.”

The lack of punctuation in the title confused me.

I was wondering what the "Spectrum Dead" was.