On the basis of the four prototypical boys in Asperger’s thesis, many clinicians and historians have assumed that he saw only “high-functioning” children in his practice, which ended up obscuring his most important discovery. The autism that he and his colleagues learned to recognize in prewar Vienna was “not at all rare,” was found in all age groups, and had a broad range of manifestations, from the inability to speak to an enhanced capacity for focusing on a single subject of interest for an extended period of time without distractions. In other words, it was a spectrum. Once you knew what
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