Dr leo kanner biography of christopher

Leo Kanner is widely credited with discovering autism. His 1943 case study, “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact,” described a bizarre new disorder so evocatively that children diagnosed in the following years were sometimes said to have “Kanner’s syndrome.” In 1943, Kanner was already a prominent figure in the new field of child psychiatry, but his work on autism is why he is remembered today.

Chaskel Leib Kanner was born in 1894 to a Jewish family in Austria.

At age 12, he moved to Berlin to live with an uncle, attending school and serving in the medical corps of the Austro-Hungarian army at the outbreak of World War I, when he was twenty. After his graduation from medical school at the University of Berlin in 1921, he became a naturalized German citizen, a requirement to practice medicine.

Kanner worked at Berlin’s leading hospital, Charité, which attracted students and clinicians from all over the world.

There he met a visiting physi