Hero or collaborator?

Steve Silberman’s stunning new book looks across history, back to Henry Cavendish, the 18th-century natural scientist who discovered hydrogen, Hugo Gernsbach, the early-20th-century inventor and pioneer of amateur ‘wireless’ radio, and countless other technically brilliant but socially awkward, eccentric non-conformists, members of the ‘neurotribe’ we now call the autism spectrum.

He argues passionately for the ‘neurodiversity’ model rather than the medical disease model, for society to stop trying to ‘cure’ or ‘normalise’ those with autism, but to recognise them as neurologically differently wired, to accept difference, and support their disabilities when these surface in certain environments. His book could serve as a manifesto about extending dignity and human rights for people with autism, just as society has now done with other neurotribes such as the deaf, left-handed or gay. It is for society to respond to his challenge.

But who would have thought that a book about the history of the puzzling condition of autism would also contain a story about a doctor working in a clinic under the unimaginably horrific conditions of the Nazi eugenic cleansing policies? Nested within this highly original book is a chapter intriguingly entitled ‘What Sister Viktorine knew’. Sister Viktorine was a nun who worked with the paediatrician Professor Hans Asperger in the Children’s Clinic at the university hospital in Vienna in the 1930s. Today we know Asperger’s name because a syndrome — a part of the autism spectrum — is named after him. Silberman takes us back to Vienna to properly understand Asperger, giving us a rare glimpse into his clinic.

Vienna, once the home of Sigmund Freud, was known for a Jewish community dating back to the 12th century and the music of the Jewish composer-conductor Gustav Mahler, until the Nazis banned it. In the 1920s, more than 200,000 people in Vienna (ten per cent of the population) were Jewish.