Best of: Age of Autism Week In A Number 1938
NOTE: Dan Olmsted wrote this post in 2016. Dan was like Christopher Columbus, following an unknown path in search of a discovery. Autism found Dan - he wasn't a father of an affected child. He was a journalist who knew to listen to sources and follow up. We miss him. If you haven't read The Age of Autism, by Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill, we recommend it to you. Their most recent collaboration is also a must read - Denial How Refusing to Face the Facts about Our Autism Epidemic Hurts Children, Families, and Our Future.
Editor's Note: Mark Blaxill and I appreciate the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders -- the leading peer-reviewed autism medical journal -- running our commentary in the issue published this week.
Leo Kanner's Mention of 1938 in His Report on Autism Refers to His First Patient.
Here is the abstract: "Leo Kanner begins his landmark 1943 case series on autistic children by stating the condition was first brought to his attention in 1938. Recent letters to JADD have described this reference as 'mysterious' and speculated it refers to papers published that year by Despert or Asperger. In fact, as Kanner goes on to state, 1938 is when he examined the first child in his case series. An exchange of letters with Despert and later writing by Kanner also point to the originality of his observations."
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The matter at hand is both seemingly arcane and ultimately overarching -- what did Leo Kanner mean when he said he became aware of autism in 1938? (He first named and wrote about it in 1943.) Commenters in the Journal have speculated it was a reference to earlier papers by other psychiatrists, which would mean autism was not a new entity, just one that Kanner codified by describing more precisely through a case series. Based on a decade of research with primary documents and personal interviews, we argued -- and, I think, we demonstrated -- that 1938 was a reference to the year the first patient was seen at his clinic at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.
That patient, Case 1 Donald T., was the first of 11 who displayed the same novel syndrome "markedly and uniquely different from anything reported so far," as Kanner wrote in that landmark 1943 report. As Ginger Taylor (who first called our attention to the recent discussion in the Journal) aptly wrote on Facebook this week: "Olmsted and Blaxill (again) show that Autism had a start date, and it was after Eli Lilly invented and began selling a water soluble form of mercury in fungicide and vaccine preservation."
So thanks to Ginger, and to Teresa Conrick, our fellow AOA editor who has made invaluable contributions to this ongoing work of identifying those original cases (we are up to 8 of 11!) and finding patterns that point to causation. You can read all about it in our book The Age of Autism, in our subsequent blog posts here, and now in the prestigious, peer-reviewed Journal. And you can count on more to come.
We ended our commentary by writing: "This timing remains the essential clue to the disorder. Something happened to bring a new condition to the attention of child psychiatry." That component can be seen from the beginning -- 1938 -- and it can be seen today, in the damage mercury-laced vaccines, and other vaccine toxins, continue to do to children in the United States and around the world. We feel privileged to have wandered onto this amazingly fruitful pathway, and we intend to keep going until its full implications are recognized and the truth about the condition first observed in 1938 is fully and finally addressed. As Einstein said, "It's not that I'm smarter than anyone else, it's just that I stick with problems longer."
Ditto.
Hans, I think you contradict yourself. Surely a label is not real, it's just a label, and probably wrong. Vaccine induced brain injury is what's real.
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I don't think Hans contradicted himself.
I understood him to mean that vaccine injury is very real. But the practice of using made up psyco-babble, to try and disguise those injuries as mysterious mental disorders of unknown cause... that's total bullshit.
Posted by: Barry | October 10, 2017 at 11:35 PM
Hans, I think you contradict yourself. Surely a label is not real, it's just a label, and probably wrong. Vaccine induced brain injury is what's real. I agree 100% with Bill's comment. Very well put.
Posted by: Grace Green | October 10, 2017 at 08:00 AM
***So-called "mental illnesses" are exactly as "real" as presents from Santa Claus, but not more real."***
Well I think they are real in the sense that they are often labels for vaccine induced brain damage.
Posted by: Hans | October 10, 2017 at 05:27 AM
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." - Arthur Schopenhauer.
Posted by: Hans | October 10, 2017 at 05:24 AM
Don't mirrors contain mercury !
Making Alice's observations all the more telling.
My theory: the tipping point differs for everyone. And since the time of mininand the occasional volcano a few sensitive souls had autism. But more and more each level of toxin --coal mining, steel mills, anything that exudes mercury (also synergistically toxic with lead by the way) tooth fillings, vaccines added on and it all increases as the vaccines increase. This is why gen 0 of 1880s has bipolar rancher ( he got mercury fillings plus lead in guns used in wars), generation 1 of 1920s has quirky grandpa NASA genius --quirky due to shoveling coal in Boston for neighborhood to make $ , gen 2 of 1960s annoying cold accountant practically asexual dad whose own NASA scientific dad got him fully vaxxed way before others of his age, gen 3 who got the full 2000 schedule including mom rhogam and flu shot and hep b at birth is full blown autistic child ... for example
Posted by: Carolyn mcd | October 10, 2017 at 02:15 AM
"Psychiatrists" are mentioned in the article above, so here's my mantra:
Psychiatry is a pseudoscience, a drug racket, and a means of social control. It's 21st Century Phrenology, with potent neuro-toxins. The DSM-5 is a catalog of billing codes, nothing more. ALL of the bogus "diagnoses" in it were INVENTED, not "discovered", to serve as excuses to $ELL DRUG$. So-called "mental illnesses" are exactly as "real" as presents from Santa Claus, but not more real."
(I want to be clear that I'm NOT denying the reality of what's labelled "autism", nor am I denying people's experience of distress suffering. My criticism is with the pseudoscience LIES of the drug racket known as psychiatry. It is NOT a legitimate medical specialty. Please visit >madinamerica.com<, for a LOT more information....)....
Thanks as usual to my friends at AoA....
Posted by: Bill | October 09, 2017 at 11:34 PM
We, I, think we've always notated Kanner's claim as Kanner's Classic Autism as it was believed that those children he examined were born that way, having been changed in utero. The autism of today's pandemic is noticed more after vaccines have been given and is named progressive autism...and supposed it starts in a child after they're born and after they've received vaccines of ..some kind. But the real testing using DNA didn't start until the late 90's,,after the DNA code was..broken open...which might have been proof tompoint to how it started and what caused it. Tho I know that the majority of children receiving the Autism or an ADD diagnosis since the late 99's, has been mostly done by behavior analysis. Maybe DNA testing on all,individuals with such diagnosis should be mandatory with the bulk of the expense being paid by insurance or the government so the average person would have a chance to do a low co-pay...instead of conducting the few mass trials done on selected individuals...?
Posted by: Margaret J. Jaeger | October 09, 2017 at 02:41 PM
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) Minimata bay was another 1907 or around that time when the company opened up then Kanner 1938 .. thats it in my mind..
Dans work I certainly miss it and if we ever got to the end of it all Dans up there for recognition for sure.
Pharma for Prison
MMR RIP
Posted by: Angus Files | October 09, 2017 at 01:41 PM
The matter at hand is both seemingly arcane and ultimately overarching -- what did Leo Kanner mean when he said he became aware of autism in 1938? (He first named and wrote about it in 1943.) Commenters in the Journal have speculated it was a reference to earlier papers by other psychiatrists, which would mean autism was not a new entity, just one that Kanner codified by describing more precisely through a case series.
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I don't believe that vaccine injury suddenly appeared when Leo Kanner decided to write about, and give a name to it. In my opinion, it's been there for as long as vaccines have there.
If we take our eyes off Kanner for a moment, and have a closer look at the vaccine timeline, we can see that in 1937 "An adsorbed form of tetanus toxoid was first licensed in the U.S. " . (http://www.immunize.org/timeline/)
Maybe he said the condition was first brought to his attention in 1938, because that's exactly what happened.
And maybe it's time the world stop zeroing in on just mercury, or just the MMR. And consider that other vaccines night be just as debilitating, if not worse.
Posted by: Barry | October 09, 2017 at 08:23 AM