Published on 12, July, 2020
https://www.autism.org.uk/about/adult-life/resources/asperger-united/new-name.aspx
If the folk at the NAS are so easily swayed by some whiny emoting from a tiny minority of folk that seek to deny history, I don't know that I can be bothered to read the thing any more.
There was nothing wrong with the old name. It matched my diagnosis.
To avoid a load of pointless arguing, no, I really don't care what Asperger did, or whether he ate peeled, salted babies for his breakfast.
On a balance scale between logic and fact, versus the emotional burden of the entire human race throughout history, logic and facts must tip the scales every single time, or humanity is lost.
Yes, some people won't like it. So what?
Ok well I had no idea why Aspergers was given the name it has, I do understand from my own perspective what it is to me.
I tell people I am autistic first and before they start looking me over I tell them I am Aspergers! Although most have no idea what it is I did have a medical professional say “oh we covered autism and you Aspergers are the super clever ones”, I bit my tongue and kept quite.
I am not high functioning in a way that would see me as super clever in any way whatsoever ever, but I do struggle in all respects of having autism.
so I appear normal but do not Fit!
All forms of repetitive stimming that were visible as a child I hid or managed to stop.. mostly due to teasing and on one occasion was seen and verbally abused as being dumb and mental.
To go back to the name Aspergers, it has been around a long time and hardly any one would connect it to the man who termed and discovered it.
PLEASE DO NOT READ FURTHER IF YOU ARE EASILY UPSET !
MY STORY CONTAINS FACTS WHICH TO THIS DAY STILL CAUSE ME GREAT UPSET!
As a child of the sixties we covered both world war 1 and 2, we were shown the harrowing film footage of concentration camps. One point that hit me very deeply was how they carried out medical research on the Jewish .
When the concentration camps were finally liberated vast documents were found which very clearly documented all the barbaric research carried out, one that sticks in my mind is break a bone then allow it to heal then break it again,,to see how often it will join back together. These individuals were kept fed enough to live through it,
My point is a decision was made to destroy it all as it was so awful, then when given more thought it was thought it better that all the many people who suffered were not forgotten and that all the facts although gained through evil and barbaric acts were not lost, they should be remembered for advancing medical knowledge.
So a huge jump in understanding was made by the suffering of others,
Should we then stop practicing any medical treatment that was only advanced this way?
They paid the biggest price, not through choice but they should never be forgotten,
sorry if any of this upsets anyone, it is fact and I feel pertinent to a name only, not the man himself.
I too am a child of the sixties and I remember growing up in the very middle of a huge post-war trauma. Should we disregard medical advancements that happened during that time? Of course not. That wouldn't make any of the horrible torture people had to endure any better. What we should do is, nevertheless, think about whom we grant a memorial, the offender or the victims? In my case, separating the merits from the faults becomes impossible at the point is when violent crimes have been committed. So yes, of course, we keep the results but we quit honoring the 'discoverer' 's name and that's a good thing to me. Would I have preferred to keep the word Asperger's as the official denomination? Yes, sure. Can I now with a clear conscience? No, certainly not. Besides, I still use the name because many can relate to it at the moment but I hope for it to change in the future and I'm sure it will and we'll be much better off without Dr. Nazi haunting our existences.
Seems I may have been told lies when I was a child. I just checked Wikipedia and stand corrected, here is an excerpt from the article.
Frederik Pohl said in a 1963 editorial in Galaxy Science Fiction that despite their cruelty the Nazi experiments produced no useful results; "it was not science and it was not medicine". If the "Herr Doktors" had, he wrote, murdered pregnant women to study their ovaries the crimes would have advanced embryology, but the earliest stages of prenatal developmentwere first observed in Boston in 1942 "without either torture or killing".[53]
The results of the Dachau freezing experiments have been used in some modern research into the treatment of hypothermia, with at least 45 publications having referenced the experiments since the Second World War.[14] This, together with the recent use of data from Nazi research into the effects of phosgene gas, has proven controversial and presents an ethical dilemma for modern physicians who do not agree with the methods used to obtain this data.[31] Some object on an ethical basis, and others have rejected Nazi research purely on scientific grounds, pointing out methodological inconsistencies. In an often-cited review of the Dachau hypothermia experiments, Berger states that the study has "all the ingredients of a scientific fraud" and that the data "cannot advance science or save human lives."[14]
Controversy has also risen from the use of results of biological warfare testing done by the Imperial Japanese Army's Unit 731.[54] The results from Unit 731 were kept classified by the United States until the majority of doctors involved were given pardons.[55]
We were told the research was used to advance medical knowledge?
Maybe as children they wanted to tell us about the atrocities but did not want us to believe it was all in Vein . I am sorry I should have checked my facts beforehand.