The foundations of autism: the law concerning psychotic, schizophrenic, and autistic children in 1950s and 1960s britain

Abstract

While the origins of child psychiatry in Britain can be traced to the interwar period, contemporary concepts and methodological approaches to pathological mental development in children were not created until the 1950s and 1960s. It was at this time that one of the most salient and lasting diagnoses in child psychiatry, autism, was established through a network of intellectual, institutional, and legal changes in Britain. This article argues that the work of child psychiatrists at the Maudsley Hospital was central in driving these changes and uses archival sources from this hospital, along with other legal and intellectual sources, to explore attempts to conceptualize pathological thought in infants in the 1950s and 1960s. When the first epidemiological study of autism was published in 1966, this finally established the autistic child as a scientific, demographic, and social reality in Britain.

Figure 1

Typed copy of the first page of the “Condition on Admission” form used to collect information from children in the psychotic clinic in the 1950s. Source: Maudsley Hospital Autism Archive.

Figure 2

“A Ward for Imbeciles in a Mental Deficiency Hospital,” ca. 1956. First printed in Leslie Hilliard and Brian Kirman, Mental Deficiency (London: Churchill, 1957).