General review

The literature (e.g. Itard, 1801; Haslam, 1809; Frith, 1989a) contains descriptions of people living several hundred years ago, who, according to our present-day terminology, would have fulfilled criteria for infantile autism (Rutter, 1978; APA, 1980) or autistic disorder (APA, 1987; APA, 1994). Obviously, autistic syndromes are not ‘new’ conditions typical of urban and industrialized societies of the twentieth century (as has been proposed by Tinbergen & Tinbergen, 1983), even though current concepts and definitions are less than 50 years old. There is no strong indication that autism is more common in urban than in rural areas or that, in ‘classical’ form it is more common now than, say 10 or 20 years ago (Gillberg et al., 1991a; Gillberg, 1992a).

Autism

Previous definitions and concepts

The US child psychiatrist Leo Kanner (1943) (born in Austria) and the Austrian paediatrician Hans Asperger (1944) were the first to describe the type of empathy disorders encompassed in the ‘autistic continuum’ (Wing, 1989a), highlighting the specificity of the social interaction deficit which has, ever since, been regarded as the core symptom of autism. Kanner was working and publishing in the US, and his reports and his views were well known to most people working in child psychiatry already in the 1950s and 1960s. Asperger, on the other hand, who worked in Vienna and published in German, did not receive widespread recognition for his contribution until the 1980s (Wing, 1981a) and early 1990s (Frith, 1991).