king his own independent discovery of the syndrome. He was at the University Pediatric Clinic in Vienna preparing his doctoral thesis on the same type of child, and he also used the term "autism" to refer to the core features of the disorder. Both men had borrowed the term from adult psychiatry, where it had been used to refer to the progressive loss of contact with the outside world experienced by schizophrenics. Autistic children seemed to suffer this same lack of contact with the world around them from a very early age (Frith, 1993, 108).
Kanner's first case was Donald, and Donald has long served as a prototype for diagnosis. The boy was seen as different from other children from a very early age. When he was two, he could hum and sing tunes accurately from memory, and soon he learned to count to 100 and to recite both the alphabet and the 25 questions and answers of the Presbyterian catechism. He also had a mania for mak
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