Fun Fact Friday: March 31st-Leo Kanner

 

In 1930, Loe Kanner was hired on by John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, to found the first children’s psychiatric department. During his time there, he established the first formal elective course in child psychiatry.

Kanner published a landmark paper, “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact” which described 11 children who were highly intelligent but displayed “a powerful desire for aloneness” and “an obsessive insistence on persistent sameness”. He later named their condition “early infantile autism,” now known as autism.

Because of this, he is referred as the “father of child psychiatry” and is considered to be one of the most influential American clinical psychiatrists of the 20th century.