The disturbing history of Dr. Asperger and the movement to reframe his syndrome

The United States seems to be insane. It seemed so in Evelyn Waugh's day, but it gets madder decade by decade, year by year. The iconoclastic urge to remove statues of Confederate heroes and to rename colleges named after slave owners is only a small part part of the strange new culture war in which the left seems win without a fight.

Illnesses named after Nazi period German doctors, such as Asperger's Syndrome, now have to be renamed. This seemed at first glance ridiculous.

Here is the article.

"Recently in the South, there’s been a movement to remove Confederate flags and statues. Is this similar?"

"Absolutely. We’re in a moment now of reconsidering the past and how we want to label the streets and schools around us. My son’s school, David Starr Jordan Middle School, just got renamed because the man had [supported] eugenics — not sterilized anyone personally, but written about sterilization. So we’re in a moment in our culture, I think, where we’re becoming more sensitive to how we want to identify and what values we want to represent."

Actually American doctors decided anyway, shortly before this came out, that the syndrome doesn't exist. Which seems to solve the problem, I'd have thought.

But looking into this in more detail, I find that Dr Asperger was a very bad man indeed. He was not a party member but that will not save him.  According to Simon Baron-Cohen he referred several children to Vienna’s Am Spiegelgrund clinic, which he undoubtedly knew was a centre of ‘child euthanasia’. Some children were starved, others given lethal injections. 


Is naming the syndrome after him a way of honouring him?


No. He did detect his syndrome, after all. It therefore logically should be called after him.


I am clear about that, I think. 


Yet ...


Had Dr Mengele done so, would I be happy for it to be named after him?

On the confederate soldiers, my views are much simpler. They were brave men fighting for their states in a just war against an invader. The villain in that case was the scoundrel Lincoln, who was responsible for an unnecessary war that killed maybe 700,000, once you include those who died of illness. I dislike him as much as I dislike Washington. I'd happily take down statues of those two men and felt disgust when Pope Francis went to America and praised Lincoln as a hero.