Speaker 1: Hey, Karen, you remember when you were talking to that
Speaker 1: librarian up in Canada. Yeah. Sure, we were trying to
Speaker 1: check out whether this sort of amazing story we had
Speaker 1: heard had really truly happened what like eighty years ago,
Speaker 1: so that we could put it in our book if
Speaker 1: it did turn out to be true. Oh yes, the
Speaker 1: incident on the train tracks and Halifax. In this librarian
Speaker 1: was really helpful. She led me to a story published
Speaker 1: in seven in the Halifax Herald. Yeah, look at this
Speaker 1: front page. All of these headlines from seven about how
Speaker 1: the world was really starting to come apart, British soldiers
Speaker 1: being Sheldon Shanghai, Italy walking out of a peace conference,
Speaker 1: and a new law passed in Germany making it illegal
Speaker 1: for Jews to go into business with non Jews, all
Speaker 1: of this foreshadowing of World War two coming. And then
Speaker 1: right here on the same front page this little headline
Speaker 1: doctor Mrs Death. Well, you know, the story of autism
Speaker 1: could have turned out very differently if what happened in
Speaker 1: Halifax had a different ending too. September A brisk afternoon
Speaker 1: by the harbor in Halifax, Nova Scotia. So close to
Speaker 1: the water you can almost taste the salt in the air.
Speaker 1: Dr leo'connor, who likes to walk, sets off on a
Speaker 1: stroll along the train tracks that trace the shoreline. Connor
Speaker 1: is forty three years old and about a year away
Speaker 1: from starting the research on autism that today defines his
Speaker 1: career for most of us. But at this point he's
Speaker 1: already well known as the world's leading authority on child psychiatry.
Speaker 1: His book on the topic is the standard text. He
Speaker 1: heads the clinical Department of Child Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins,
Speaker 1: the first of its kind in the world. He's up
Speaker 1: in Canada for a conference. During a break, he takes
Speaker 1: a ferry across Halifax Harbor to have lunch at the
Speaker 1: home of an old friend. Afterwards, Connor decides to walk
Speaker 1: back to the ferry landing. It's a gorgeous walk along
Speaker 1: a set of railroad tracks. But at a certain point
Speaker 1: these tracks cut out across a stretch of water, a
Speaker 1: little inlet called Dartmouth Cove. So now the tracks are
Speaker 1: running on top of this rickety wooden bridge. It's a
Speaker 1: train trestle about twenty ft above the water, and it's
Speaker 1: really narrow, just wide enough for a single set of
Speaker 1: railroad tracks. So there's really no shoulder there and there
Speaker 1: are no guardrails, but getting across it looks like it
Speaker 1: should take a minute or two. It most so. Connor
Speaker 1: continues on steps onto the trestle and starts stepping carefully
Speaker 1: from railroad tie to railroad tie. He's out near the
Speaker 1: middle of the bridge when he sees the train coming
Speaker 1: at him. The train is moving fast. He's already too
Speaker 1: late to run back. His only option jump, but he
Speaker 1: doesn't jump. Instead, he attempts this sort of weird maneuver
Speaker 1: where he steps out as far as he can on
Speaker 1: one of the railroad ties, and he tries to make
Speaker 1: himself as small as he can. I guess in the
Speaker 1: hope that there would be enough rule him for this
Speaker 1: oncoming locomotive to just squeezed by without hitting him. It
Speaker 1: doesn't work. The train hits him. It just clips him.
Speaker 1: Connor falls, his overcoat flapping up around him, his arms flailing,
Speaker 1: and then he hits the water. He's terrified, and not
Speaker 1: just because he's just been hit by a train. It's
Speaker 1: for the same reason that he chose not to jump.
Speaker 1: He can't swim. It is definitely not looking good for
Speaker 1: the doctor from Baltimore. Question, what do I feel about
Speaker 1: retirement of Well, for one thing, I so far, I
Speaker 1: haven't retired. Here's Connor years later in an interview. The
Speaker 1: quality is kind of rough here and there, so we
Speaker 1: brought in a voice actor to recreate Connor's words verbatim.
Speaker 1: What do I feel about retirement and dead? Well, for
Speaker 1: one thing, so I haven't retired. Second, as to debt,
Speaker 1: that is something that comes to everybody. I was near
Speaker 1: death when I had my accident in Nova Scotia, and
Speaker 1: since then it has given me a great deal of
Speaker 1: satisfaction to know that at that time I wasn't panicking.
Speaker 1: The only thought I had then was a good thing.
Speaker 1: My insurance policies are all paid up. Dead comes to everybody,
Speaker 1: it will come to me. So just when it looks
Speaker 1: like he's going to drown, Connor gets really lucky. A
Speaker 1: member of the train crew named Murray Hanes, according to
Speaker 1: the newspaper story, sees the doctor hit the water and
Speaker 1: Haynes dives into the cold waters. He gets to Connor
Speaker 1: and pulls him to shore. A passerby runs for help
Speaker 1: from a doctor who lives nearby. Connor is badly shaken
Speaker 1: up and he has a broken hip, but he's alive,
Speaker 1: and Connie recovered pretty quickly. He was out of his
Speaker 1: plaster cast within him better of months, and never even
Speaker 1: had a limp after everything that happened. He does complain, however,
Speaker 1: that the accident left him unable to dance, which of
Speaker 1: course was a joke, because Connor could never dance to
Speaker 1: begin with. Connor may have made light of what happened,
Speaker 1: but when John and I were researching the origins of
Speaker 1: the autism diagnosis, we always wondered what would the world
Speaker 1: be like if that guy hadn't jumped in to save him.
Speaker 1: How would we be thinking about kids with autism? Would
Speaker 1: we still be locking kids away for life, euthanizing them,
Speaker 1: sterilizing them. Would autism as we understand it today even
Speaker 1: have been recognized by now? Your question is an extremely
Speaker 1: important one, probably an unanswerable one. That's Dr Leon Eisenberg.
Speaker 1: He worked under Connor as a young doctor, and then
Speaker 1: he went on to become a huge figure himself in
Speaker 1: child psychiatry. It's a question that's raised in physics so
Speaker 1: all the time, and you get these wonderful stories about
Speaker 1: the guy who goes to sleep and see the six
Speaker 1: carbon atoms holding their hands, and when he wakes up
Speaker 1: in the morning says, that's it, that's it, that's it. Well,
Speaker 1: what capacity to take an abstract problem and to make
Speaker 1: it visual to see the the atoms holding onto each other,
Speaker 1: and then RAMI faded back towards is a question I
Speaker 1: think we have a really successfully answered. So your question
Speaker 1: is important. It's probably unanswerable. From my Heart radio, this
Speaker 1: is autism's first child. I'm Karen Zucker and I'm John Dunvin.
Speaker 1: In our last episode, we met Beamon and Mary Triplet
Speaker 1: of Forest, Mississippi their determination to unlock the meaning of
Speaker 1: their little boy, Donald's unexpected behavior. We'll change history in
Speaker 1: this episode, Donald meets the father of child, said Kietry.
Speaker 1: Episode two Connor Syndrome, a young couple from a town
Speaker 1: called Forest, Mississippi, Beamon and Mary Triplet brought their three
Speaker 1: year old boy, who was acting and speaking in ways
Speaker 1: they didn't understand, to an institution about an hour and
Speaker 1: a half from their home to live there without them.
Speaker 1: They arrived at the institution, checked him in, and then
Speaker 1: they drove home. There's no way for us to know
Speaker 1: how painful this was for Mary and Beaman, but they
Speaker 1: were doing what parents in that error were told to
Speaker 1: do by almost the entire medical establishment whenever a child
Speaker 1: in the family presented as mentally defective. Those two words
Speaker 1: just sounds so horrible, but in that era, that's how
Speaker 1: doctors talked about kids like Donald who were different. The
Speaker 1: idea was to remove those kids from their families, like
Speaker 1: they were not fully human and even posed a danger
Speaker 1: to society. And then the families were told to move
Speaker 1: on with their lives, as though these kids didn't even exist.
Speaker 1: To get on with their lives, that was the phrase
Speaker 1: they used. Have more kids, that kind of thing. Mary
Speaker 1: and Beaman did that. They had another son, Oliver, with
Speaker 1: Donald away, so they were kind of playing by the roles.
Speaker 1: But there was a part of them that we sing
Speaker 1: didn't feel right about that. And here's what we know
Speaker 1: happened next. They wanted basically to get another opinion about Donald,
Speaker 1: and they wanted to get it not just from another doctor,
Speaker 1: but from the top child psychiatrist in the country, if
Speaker 1: not the world, who was none other than the man
Speaker 1: who nearly perished in that train accident less than a
Speaker 1: year earlier. Dr leo'connor. Now Connor is a fascinating and
Speaker 1: singular character. Here's Dr Leon Eisenberg again reflecting on his
Speaker 1: mentors personnel pity. He who was an unusual child, who
Speaker 1: is an unusual capacity for memory aver seeing patterns where
Speaker 1: they were not fel Evidently, he was born in Austria
Speaker 1: and he went to med school in Berlin. Well, I
Speaker 1: might say briefly in the internroduction that I had originally
Speaker 1: had my medical training in Berlin medical school. That's from
Speaker 1: an interview with Dr Connor in two. It's one of
Speaker 1: three long interviews recently discovered by the archivist at the
Speaker 1: American Psychiatric Association, and these tapes have probably only ever
Speaker 1: been heard by a handful of scholars. I had some
Speaker 1: excellent teachers that included a classical student of organic psychosis
Speaker 1: and would later be punished after going against Tyler and
Speaker 1: his son was killed by Nazis. I specialized first in
Speaker 1: internal medicine. I came in on the ground for of
Speaker 1: electric cardiography and published my thesis on electric cardiographic work
Speaker 1: and also my first paper. Connor was thirty years old
Speaker 1: and had a growing medical practice in Berlin when he
Speaker 1: moved to Yankton, South Dakota on a whim. An American
Speaker 1: physician he had grown close to helped Connor land a
Speaker 1: position at the South Dakota State Hospital for the Insane.
Speaker 1: Connor was fluent in seven languages when he arrived in Yankton. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: English wasn't one of them. He worked at changing that,
Speaker 1: just as he worked hard at becoming culturally American, buying
Speaker 1: a Chevy, taking up golf, joining a weekly poker game.
Speaker 1: Back then, the field of psychiatry was still new and
Speaker 1: not really professionalized like it is today. Basically there was
Speaker 1: Freud and a lot of Germans and Austrians theorizing about neuroses,
Speaker 1: and then there were just regular doctors working in mental
Speaker 1: hospitals figuring out how to help patients just using their instincts.
Speaker 1: They were basically self taught, and that's how Connor learned psychiatry. Also,
Speaker 1: working in Yankton, he developed his own values and philosophies
Speaker 1: about how mental patients should be treated them. One of
Speaker 1: them was he thought we should avoid pigeonholing people and
Speaker 1: getting to know them as individuals, as people with their
Speaker 1: own stories that needed to be listened to, and doing
Speaker 1: that became one of the hallmarks of his life's work.
Speaker 1: Here's the late doctor James Harris, another of Connor's protegees
Speaker 1: from Hopkins, in an interview with the BBC, he was
Speaker 1: a wise man, a scholar, a compassionate clinician. Although he
Speaker 1: was retired, he would drop by the clinic and encourage
Speaker 1: staff members in their work. But I think most importantly
Speaker 1: was his rapport with children. Children talked to him, he listened.
Speaker 1: His timing was exceptional. He was particularly concerned the children
Speaker 1: be treated as individuals. They tell the stories if you
Speaker 1: let them, if you don't use the aha reaction, you
Speaker 1: know what they mean by that. Some people look at
Speaker 1: drawing and say, Aha, this means this, and this means
Speaker 1: that to home to the interpreter. But if you're going
Speaker 1: to give a chance to talk about it, you'd get
Speaker 1: their story and not your biases and preoccupations. Connor got
Speaker 1: restless and yanked in and he left to work on
Speaker 1: a three year fellowship at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. When
Speaker 1: the fellowship was finished, Hopkins gave Connor the job of
Speaker 1: setting up the first psychiatric department within a pediatric hospital
Speaker 1: in the United States. In short order, he became the
Speaker 1: field's most prominent figure. But at the start, the hospital
Speaker 1: provided Connor with just a small room that had a
Speaker 1: washstand and a desk. The little acorn from which the
Speaker 1: oak of the Children's Psychiatric Service at Yarns Hopkins Hospital
Speaker 1: grew was not much to look at. I was installed
Speaker 1: in an abandoned annex and the Harrott Lynn Home, which
Speaker 1: was once used as an isolation ward for children with
Speaker 1: infectious diseases. The room assigned to me had a shaky
Speaker 1: white table, there was no waiting room, and there was
Speaker 1: nobody to look after the children when I interviewed the parents.
Speaker 1: Occasionally an adventurous rodent found its way up from the
Speaker 1: cellar and enabled at the sandwich which I had brought
Speaker 1: for lunch. But it grew from there as Connor became
Speaker 1: a major figure in the United States and eventually around
Speaker 1: the world, whose textbook called Child Psychiatry became the standard
Speaker 1: in the field, and Hopkins itself became the training ground
Speaker 1: for dozens of young doctors who would go on to
Speaker 1: forever change our understanding of pediatric psychiatry. And it's where
Speaker 1: one day in the summer of Connor received a letter
Speaker 1: from the father of Donald Triplet. Now John and I
Speaker 1: knew something about the backstory of this letter. We know
Speaker 1: that back in forest, Beaman triplet dictated to his secretary
Speaker 1: while she filled her notepad with shorthand then she typed
Speaker 1: it all up. Beamon wasn't just a successful lawyer. He
Speaker 1: was a man with first rate observational skill, and he
Speaker 1: was determined to compose a really full, complete, comprehensive biography
Speaker 1: of this four year old child that he and his
Speaker 1: wife had sent away. And this letter he wrote would
Speaker 1: turn out to be a game changer. In time. His
Speaker 1: words would travel far and wide around the world. They
Speaker 1: would be quoted in scholarly research, They would be discussed
Speaker 1: in university classrooms. They would be translated into many many languages.
Speaker 1: But on that human day and forest, it was just
Speaker 1: one father speaking from his heart about his boy. You
Speaker 1: seem to be self satisfied. He is never glad to
Speaker 1: say father or mother. He has no apparent affection when petted,
Speaker 1: it does not observe the fact that anyone combs or goes. It.
Speaker 1: Never seemed glad to say father or mother or any playmate.
Speaker 1: He seems to draw into his shell and live within himself.
Speaker 1: He seldom comes to anyone when called, but actually picked
Speaker 1: up and carried or led wherever he ought to go.
Speaker 1: Beamon described Donald's eating habits, his verbal patterns, the age
Speaker 1: of which he learned to walk and count and hum
Speaker 1: and sane. And here's the thing, Little Donald showed glimmers
Speaker 1: of real brilliance for a young child, and has just
Speaker 1: tantalized his parents to see how he dialed in on
Speaker 1: activities that captivated him in such an intense way at
Speaker 1: the age of two, that will memorize the words of
Speaker 1: many songs and the melodies that went with them, the
Speaker 1: names of all of the presidents of the United States.
Speaker 1: But here's the other thing. According to his father, Donald
Speaker 1: could do little with these facts beyond reciting them rotely.
Speaker 1: He said that conversation with his son was impossible because
Speaker 1: Donald seemed to have no interest in people, and he
Speaker 1: wasn't learning to ask or answer questions. In fact, he said,
Speaker 1: his son seemed unreachable by any of the usual ways
Speaker 1: that parents connect with their kids. He appears to always
Speaker 1: be thinking and thinking, and to get his attention almost
Speaker 1: requires wanted to break down a mental barrier between his
Speaker 1: inner consciousness in the outside world. Beaman's letter went on
Speaker 1: and on like this. By the time as secretary finished
Speaker 1: typing the letter, it ran to thirty three single space pages,
Speaker 1: and it's historic because it would be the basis of
Speaker 1: a landmark account of a child with autism, a term
Speaker 1: and diagnosis that did not yet exist. When we return
Speaker 1: Beaman and Mary Triplets stage a rescue for their little boy.
Speaker 1: So Beaman sent the letter off to Baltimore, and Connor
Speaker 1: received it and he read it, and he wanted to
Speaker 1: see Donald. A date was set, and in those days
Speaker 1: far As, Mississippi was a long way away from Baltimore, Maryland,
Speaker 1: but that's where Donald was heading now for an in
Speaker 1: person meeting with Dr Connor during the first week of October.
Speaker 1: Beamon triplets letter describing Donald is a hugely important document
Speaker 1: because it's just so influential. But sadly for us, for everyone,
Speaker 1: most of what he wrote has been lost. We have
Speaker 1: excerpts quotations from it that Connor published, but the original
Speaker 1: it's gone and there don't seem to be any copies,
Speaker 1: so we've never been able to read the full text,
Speaker 1: not that we didn't try. In fact, we searched for
Speaker 1: that letter a long long time. We pastor Johns Hopkins
Speaker 1: to look through their archives and they never turned it up,
Speaker 1: although we did find some of Donald's initial medical records. There,
Speaker 1: we went through every page of the Connor archive at
Speaker 1: the American Psychiatric Association. Then we went down to Forest
Speaker 1: and visited Beamon's old law office, where there was a
Speaker 1: room stuffed with old, rusting metal file cabinets stuffed with papers,
Speaker 1: but nothing there of that letter. We went to an
Speaker 1: old bank vault in Forest that his family used to
Speaker 1: store the overflow from Beamon's law practice and went through
Speaker 1: all of those filing cabinets. Nothing there. Then Donald let
Speaker 1: us go through all of the cupboards and closets and
Speaker 1: drawers and a x in the house where he grew up.
Speaker 1: His family had saved everything. In fact up in the attic.
Speaker 1: We found love letters between Mary and Beeman in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen twenties, perfectly preserved after a century. But we
Speaker 1: just didn't find what we were looking for, that famous letter.
Speaker 1: So writing that letter was just one step Donald's parents stuff.
Speaker 1: The next one was even more important in Donald's life.
Speaker 1: They had sent him away because they were told it
Speaker 1: was the right thing to do. Now they decided it
Speaker 1: wasn't the right thing at all. Here's Donald's nephew, Oh B. Triplett.
Speaker 1: I think one day. So she said, you know what,
Speaker 1: I'm not doing this. I am not doing this. It
Speaker 1: doesn't you know, doesn't pay all right or whatever. And
Speaker 1: then you know, we're going to turn the page and
Speaker 1: started to know the chapter in the life of Don.
Speaker 1: So they drove back down to that institution and they
Speaker 1: told the director they were taking Donald out and taking
Speaker 1: him back home. And here's the amazing thing. They got
Speaker 1: pushed back. Okay, the director insisted, and this is a quote.
Speaker 1: Donald is getting along nicely now, and he said they
Speaker 1: should leave him alone, which meant leave him there. But
Speaker 1: Mary's mind was made up. She dressed Donald and clothes
Speaker 1: she had brought him from home, and then the three
Speaker 1: of them got in the car and they drove home
Speaker 1: together and now to Baltimore. Donald had just turned five
Speaker 1: a few days earlier when he and his parents boarded
Speaker 1: the train in Meridian, Mississippi. The train journey took two
Speaker 1: days across seven states, and for Donald, we imagine this
Speaker 1: trip must have been one of those bewildering, maybe mesmerizing
Speaker 1: explosions of new sensory experiences. I mean, don't we all
Speaker 1: have that experience in a train at night, staring out
Speaker 1: the windows, watching the lights, sling through the blackness outside.
Speaker 1: Their journey ended in Baltimore at the Harriet Lane Home
Speaker 1: for Invalid Children. After a physical exam, Donald was led
Speaker 1: into a hospital library and presented to a group of
Speaker 1: roughly thirty physicians. Donald blocked eyes on some alphabet blocks
Speaker 1: in one of the doctor's hands. He grabbed them and
Speaker 1: started spinning them, seemingly completely oblivious to anything else going on.
Speaker 1: And a little later he walked up to one of
Speaker 1: the older doctors and reached up to stroke his beard.
Speaker 1: Our research on Donald's story brought us to the library
Speaker 1: at the American Psychiatric Association in Arlington, Virginia. He spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time there and found, amongst many other things,
Speaker 1: that Leo Connor had written an unpublished autobiography. More recently,
Speaker 1: a series of audio recordings of long interviews Connor sat
Speaker 1: for in the late nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies was discovered,
Speaker 1: and Karen, you made a really interesting find in the
Speaker 1: Hopkins archives, the intake notes on Donald for when he
Speaker 1: first got to Hopkins. Yeah, they were only a few
Speaker 1: pages long, but no journalists had ever seen them before.
Speaker 1: In October nine hundred and thirty eight, a five year
Speaker 1: old boy was brought to me from Forest, Mississippi. I
Speaker 1: was struck by the uniqueness of the peculiarities which Donald exhibited.
Speaker 1: He could, since the age of two and a half years,
Speaker 1: tell the names of all presidents and vice presidents, recite
Speaker 1: the letters of the alphabet forwards and backwards, and flawlessly,
Speaker 1: with good enunciation, rattle off the twenty third song. Yet
Speaker 1: he was unable to carry on an ordinary conversation. He
Speaker 1: was out of contact with people. What he could handle
Speaker 1: objects skillfully, His memory was phenomenal. The few times when
Speaker 1: he addressed someone, largely to satisfy his wants, he referred
Speaker 1: to himself as you and to the person a desk
Speaker 1: as I. He didn't respond to any form of intelligence testing,
Speaker 1: but manipulated intricate form boards jointly. Donald remained in Baltimore
Speaker 1: for two weeks observation and study at the Child Study Center,
Speaker 1: on whose the directors I was a member, and of
Speaker 1: course Connor and his colleagues remarked on all of the
Speaker 1: ways that Donald appeared to isolate himself. Connor observed that
Speaker 1: Donald showed disappointment when he didn't get his way, and
Speaker 1: it seemed that he did like getting praise. That's all
Speaker 1: stuff a typical child would do. But Connor also noted
Speaker 1: Donald doing some really unusual things. For example, he would
Speaker 1: walk around drawing letters in the air with his fingers
Speaker 1: and speaking out random words like semicolon and capital and
Speaker 1: twelve twelve. He chewed on paper, he put food in
Speaker 1: his hair, he threw books into the toilet, he put
Speaker 1: a key down the water drain, he threw temper tantrums,
Speaker 1: he climbed all over the furniture. So Donald spent two
Speaker 1: weeks being observed in Baltimore, and after that the family
Speaker 1: went back home to Mississippi, and from that point on,
Speaker 1: Mary started sending almost monthly letters to Connor describing how
Speaker 1: he was doing at home, and some of what she
Speaker 1: wrote showed some real development going on. He learned to
Speaker 1: read fluently and to play simple tunes on the piano.
Speaker 1: He began responding to yes or no questions. He started
Speaker 1: building things with his blocks, watering flowers with his hose,
Speaker 1: playing store with the household groceries. Yet it was clear
Speaker 1: that Donald still had some serious challenges, and he made
Speaker 1: several more visits to Baltimore over the next few years,
Speaker 1: kind of becoming one of Connor's favorite patients. The truth
Speaker 1: is Donald fascinated le O'Connor and made him want to
Speaker 1: figure out exactly how this boy was different and why,
Speaker 1: and Donald's parents wanted to know the same thing. We
Speaker 1: found some correspondence between Connor and Mary where she admitted
Speaker 1: to being worried that she had quote a hopelessly insane child.
Speaker 1: Connor took these feelings seriously, and he wanted her to
Speaker 1: be more optimistic. In his next letter, he urged her
Speaker 1: to quote refrain from that type of gloom. Many times
Speaker 1: he wrote to reassure her that our efforts to help
Speaker 1: Donald were splendid and often heroic. Donald, he insisted, was
Speaker 1: fortunate in having you for a mother. Important things were
Speaker 1: happening in Donald's life during these years. In the fall
Speaker 1: of nineteen thirty nine, he began the first grade. Mary
Speaker 1: wrote Connor about that also October nineteen thirty nine. The
Speaker 1: first day was very trying for him, but each succeeding
Speaker 1: day he's improved very much. Dawn is much more independent.
Speaker 1: He wants to do many things for herself. He marches
Speaker 1: in line nicely, answers when called upon, and is more
Speaker 1: bidable and obedient. In March of nineteen forty, in the
Speaker 1: middle of the first grade year, Mary noted to Connor,
Speaker 1: the greatest improvement I noticed is in his awareness of
Speaker 1: things about him. He talks very much more and asked
Speaker 1: a good many questions. Not often does he voluntarily tell
Speaker 1: me things at school, but if I asked leading questions,
Speaker 1: he answers them correctly. He really enters into the gangs
Speaker 1: with other children. One day he enlisted the family in
Speaker 1: one game he had just learned, telling each of us
Speaker 1: just what to do. Donald paid another visit to Connor.
Speaker 1: In one he was inexhaustible and bringing up variations like
Speaker 1: how many days in a week, years in a century,
Speaker 1: hours in a day, hours and a half day, weeks
Speaker 1: in a century, centuries and a half a millennium. So
Speaker 1: it's now four years since Connor and Donald met, and
Speaker 1: Mary starting to get impatient for something. She wants a
Speaker 1: solid explanation, a diagnosis. She writes to Connor, complaining that
Speaker 1: he had given her only generalities. The truth was, he
Speaker 1: confessed that he still simply could not match Donald with
Speaker 1: any familiar or standard label, nothing that was in the textbooks,
Speaker 1: nor could he predict Donald's future prospects. Donald's behaviors comprised
Speaker 1: the syndrome. Connor was still struggling to see in full.
Speaker 1: But then he told her some news that he was
Speaker 1: beginning to realize that Donald had a novel kind of syndrome.
Speaker 1: He said, he is putting together a paper detailing the
Speaker 1: outlines of this new diagnosis. He kept this news to himself,
Speaker 1: he said, because he wanted to have sufficient time to
Speaker 1: observe the children and follow their development. Soon, however, he
Speaker 1: intended to go public with these findings and to give
Speaker 1: his discovery a name. In Dr Leo O'Connor published his
Speaker 1: landmark paper Autistic Disturbances of Effective Contact. For here we
Speaker 1: seem to have pure cultural examples of inborn artistic disturbances
Speaker 1: of effective conduct. The way Connor describes autism, the way
Speaker 1: he wrote about it, and the language he used, was
Speaker 1: remarkable in itself. What he did made autism, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of a thing because it was so clear and
Speaker 1: accessible to the reader. That's Dr Joseph Pivet. I'm a
Speaker 1: psychiatrist with training and child menolyist and psychiatry and adult psychiatry.
Speaker 1: I've done a number of different things in my research career.
Speaker 1: Now is looking at infants at high familiar risk for
Speaker 1: autism and following them over time, looking at how their
Speaker 1: brains develop and their behavior, and have kind of connected
Speaker 1: with leo'connor in that area. Dr Piven is a big
Speaker 1: fan of Leo connor's. I give a lot of talks
Speaker 1: to trainees and students and particularly those that don't know
Speaker 1: about autism, maybe graduate students in neuroscience, and and I
Speaker 1: asked the students to read that first paper because while
Speaker 1: it's not synonymous with the breath and of the way
Speaker 1: we think about autism today, it's just so rich and
Speaker 1: it's description. I often talk about how you could you
Speaker 1: could read the d s M all day and sit
Speaker 1: on the bus next to somebody with autism and not
Speaker 1: realize that they have autism. But if you read Lee
Speaker 1: O'Connor's accounts, it just as you say, leaps off the page.
Speaker 1: You know, not only was he institute observer in general
Speaker 1: and a great writer, but he was able to kind
Speaker 1: of distill some of the essential features out that are
Speaker 1: still with us today. And we're still sort of wrestling
Speaker 1: with terms that really kind of have persisted in our conversation,
Speaker 1: like insistence on sameness, something that's important to understand the
Speaker 1: term autistic wasn't something that Connor came up with on
Speaker 1: his own. It had been quite a few decades earlier
Speaker 1: to describe a behavior that was thought to be unique
Speaker 1: to schizophrenia, where people sometimes withdraw for a while socially
Speaker 1: and appear to lose contact with the outer world. So
Speaker 1: back in the nineteen thirties and nineties, psychiatrists who described
Speaker 1: somebody as autistic or displaying autism meant only that the
Speaker 1: person was behaving that way, that socially withdrawn way for
Speaker 1: the moment. It described one symptom, not a syndrome, and
Speaker 1: definitely it did not yet describe the diagnosis we know today.
Speaker 1: Various psychiatrists applied it to various people with various constellations
Speaker 1: of behaviors, and now Connor was using it to characterize
Speaker 1: something about the complex set of behaviors he saw Donald
Speaker 1: and the other children that together he believed constituted a single,
Speaker 1: never before recognized diagnosis. Here's Connor again, in in my
Speaker 1: search find appropriate designation, I decided on the term early
Speaker 1: infantile autism, thus accentuating the time of the first manifestations
Speaker 1: and the children's limited accessibility. Years later, Dr Connor claimed
Speaker 1: that identifying autism was serendipity. He didn't discover this syndrome,
Speaker 1: he said, because it was always there. Connor, however, news
Speaker 1: that in psychiatry the obvious often went unrecognized until someone
Speaker 1: looked at it with the right set of eyes. And
Speaker 1: that's what leo'connor had meeting Donald. Thinking about Donald gave
Speaker 1: him the right set of eyes to recognize what today
Speaker 1: we call autism. Today we call it autism, but there
Speaker 1: was a time and you can still find this in
Speaker 1: the medical literature from the nineteen fifties when the syndrome
Speaker 1: that Leo Connor wrote about was called by many professionals
Speaker 1: Connor's syndrome. In the mid twentieth century, having a syndrome
Speaker 1: named for you is considered a great honor, but Connor
Speaker 1: didn't really go for it. I'm identified little too closely
Speaker 1: with one particular thing that I did, and that I
Speaker 1: consider a vignette of my activities rather than the main principle.
Speaker 1: But now autism is identified with me, and I with it.
Speaker 1: I think it just speaks to the fact that he
Speaker 1: was an incredible human being, and incredible human beings don't
Speaker 1: try and sell themselves on one thing they accomplished, that's
Speaker 1: Dr Piven. If you train at Hopkins and Child Psychiatry,
Speaker 1: interacting with Leo Connor is on a warble, you know.
Speaker 1: So he clearly was the first director of child psychiatry Hopkins.
Speaker 1: That's not a small thing in those days. He wrote
Speaker 1: the first textbook on child psychiatry, so he essentially established
Speaker 1: the field of child psychiatry. But he also used his
Speaker 1: stature and position in some of the cultural wars of
Speaker 1: his era. Remember he was working when ideas like eugenic
Speaker 1: still had a huge following among important people. Well, here's
Speaker 1: a clip of Connor describing an argument he started at
Speaker 1: the American Psychiatric Association meeting in twenty five years ago.
Speaker 1: At the meeting of the a p A in Richmond
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty one, then famous neurologists from New York
Speaker 1: gave a talk on euthanasia for the feeble minded, with
Speaker 1: the general feeling they are dragon society off with their
Speaker 1: heads too much money. I rarely get real angry, but
Speaker 1: they did at the time, and there was no discussion anticipated,
Speaker 1: but I got up and had my say, whereupon I
Speaker 1: was asked to give a talk the next year at
Speaker 1: the two meeting in Boston, which I did, and which
Speaker 1: I called Exoneration of the feeble Minded. You know, Connor's
Speaker 1: use of the term feeble minded reminds us that he
Speaker 1: was still very much a man of his time, But
Speaker 1: the fact that he was doing battle with the eugenicists
Speaker 1: also shows us how he was ahead of his time too,
Speaker 1: and that he pioneered the entire field of child psychiatry,
Speaker 1: which took that special ability to listen and to empathize.
Speaker 1: It really helped to open the door to a lot
Speaker 1: of progress and growth and killing. And yes, if he
Speaker 1: hadn't survived being hit by that train, who knows where
Speaker 1: we'd be. But we know Connor would never have met Donald,
Speaker 1: and Donald would never have met Connor. And in this
Speaker 1: version of how autism came to be known to the
Speaker 1: world at large, well the two of them meeting, it's
Speaker 1: how it did happen, and it really was everything. I'm
Speaker 1: John don Vent and I'm Karen Zuker. Autism's First Child
Speaker 1: is a production of School of Humans and I Heart Podcasts,
Speaker 1: and it's based on our book and our documentary film
Speaker 1: in a different Key. Autism's First Child is produced by
Speaker 1: Alexander Ritchie our story. Editors are Matt Riddle and Alex French,
Speaker 1: senior staff writer at I Heeart Originals. Original score composed
Speaker 1: and mixed by Alice McCoy. Additional scoring, mixing and mastering
Speaker 1: by Alexander Ritchie. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr,
Speaker 1: Elsie Crowley and Jason English. Special thanks to Ray Conley, Ernie,
Speaker 1: Indra Doot and Will Pearson. Editing an assembly by Kareem
Speaker 1: ben Yagoub. Voice worked by Louis Carloso, Ben Ritchie and
Speaker 1: Missy Ritchie for the recordings of Dr Lee O'Connor. Special
Speaker 1: thanks to Dina Goreland of the American Psychiatric Association Foundation,
Speaker 1: Melvin Saption, Empty Librarian Archives, and A p A Foundation
Speaker 1: School of Humans m