What if Kanner had not written about autistic children?

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If for some reason Leo Kanner had not written his paper 'Autistic disturbances of affective contact', published in Nervous Child in 1943 in which he described autism as a set of behaviours, (say that he died before 1943) would autism have been named and described by someone else? Was it more or less inevitable that sooner or later autism would be 'discovered'?

Also if Hans Asperger had not written his paper on autistic pyschopathology, which was published in 1944, or if that paper had been lost in military action in the final months of the Second World War in Vienna, then the term 'Aspergers syndrome' would not have been coined and the term 'Aspie' would not exist.

If autism had not been described by Kanner or Asperger I guess that autistics and Aspies would attract diagnoses and labels such as schizophrenic, weird, antisocial etc.

It is most likely that even if Asperger's paper had been written and had survived the Second World War, it would have remained unknown and not translated into English, if Kanner had not written his paper or if autism had not become a subject for study by psychiatrists and psychologists.

Woodpeace,

Aspergers papers WERE basically LOST in the war! Had they not been, I and many others here probably would have been diagnosed AS.

Inevitable, considering the way societies have been progressing, i.e., standardized social norms that concentrate on the majority rather than the minority, and the "different" minority are being forced to fit themselves into the majority, and since they cannot--couldn't, we have these disorders that explain why we cannot, or have difficulty in such.

I like the name autism, i.e., "self", and it describes the child who has Asperger's or autism adequately; as we grow, most of us move out of this "self", but we have these marked differences that make it so hard to live in modern society.

Schizophrenia, mental retardation, etcetera, don't adequately describe the unique symptom clusters of ASDs; they can be associated with ASDs, but one can develop a bacterial infection after a viral infection (this logic follows).

If neither Kanner nor Asperger had discovered autism, then someone else would have done, probably not long after. This always happens in science. It seems like most discoveries have a 'time' at which they will happen (it depends upon the level of previous knowledge at that point) and by then there are so many clues that someone picks up on it, or multiple people. In science it is really common that several people make the same discovery at one time and I wouldnt be surprised if there were others who made the autism connection at a similar time or slightly later than Kanner anyway. However, it would probably have a different name.