Victor, Carrie Buck, and what a diagnosis was allowed to cost

France, late 1700s. Villagers found a small boy living in the forest — l'enfant sauvage d'Aveyron — who kept slipping away from their clutches and reappearing over a period of five years. Taken to Paris and studied by Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, he was found to be mute, possibly deaf, covered in scars and burns, with one scar on his neck that looked like someone had tried to kill him. They named him Victor and spent years trying to "fix" him — teaching him French with little success. He was not afraid of fire, burst out giggling at inappropriate times, could not learn to read or write, spoke very little. But he seemed to have empathy and a big heart. Nearly two centuries later, the autistic researcher Uta Frith studied Victor in depth and concluded he was autistic — a misunderstood child subjected to testing and grown-ups trying to fix him according to the behavioral norms of the time.

A couple hundred years later the clinical concept arrived. Eugen Bleuler used the term autism around 1908 for schizophrenic patients who withdrew into themselves. In 1943 Leo Kanner described eleven children with what he called "early infantile autism" — separating autism from schizophrenia, but still rooting it in abnormalcy, a deficit, a problem to fix. Except his patient Donald went on to school, college, work, travel, family — a whole person outside his clinical diagnosis as a toddler. The most important thing I took from this slide: we can see exactly who holds the dominant power to produce knowledge about what is normal or abnormal in society.

Buck v. Bell (1927) is where I had to stop writing slides and sit still. Carrie Buck was eighteen, diagnosed as feeble-minded, institutionalized in Virginia — after being raped while living with a foster family — and the state wanted her forcibly sterilized. The Supreme Court upheld it. She was deemed not normal, therefore less than, therefore easily manipulated and controlled through "legal" means. This is discrimination; this is eugenics in practice. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote that "three generations of imbeciles are enough." That is the context neurodivergent people carried into World War II — and eugenics was not a Nazi invention; it had been growing in England and the Global North since the 1880s.

Hans Asperger, working in the 1930s, described children with extreme social challenges who also had unusual abilities and interests. He never used the term "Asperger's Syndrome" — he called his patients "autistic psychopaths." The horrific context: the Nazi regime was already identifying people deemed unfit to live, and there is evidence Asperger referred multiple children to Am Spiegelgrund, the Vienna hospital where disabled children were subjected to neglect, abuse, experimentation, and killing as part of the Nazi child euthanasia system. I cannot use the observation and discard the context. Both are the inheritance.