The person responsible for expanding the definition of autism, leading to a huge uptick in diagnoses, was the English child psychiatrist Lorna Wing. When she began her work in this area in the late 1950s, autism was considered such a rare, extreme, and debilitating condition that only two to four in ten thousand children received the diagnosis. The syndrome was first diagnosed in 1943 by the psychiatrist Leo Kanner and, according to his definition, autistic children, though "unquestionably endowed with good cognitive potentialities," lived in their own worlds, engaged in repetitive motions, became obsessed with objects, often had limited speech, and struggled to perform the basics of self-care.

DEFINE: Contrasts Kanner's original narrow 1943 definition of autism with Wing's later expansion, which is central to understanding how the diagnostic category evolved.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 668