When Austrian-born Leo Kanner migrated to the U.S. in 1924, child psychiatry did not exist. Today it is a respected and flourishing subspecialty, thanks more to pioneering Dr. Kanner, 66, than to any other man. Last week professional colleagues across the continent were reading his modest but unapologetic spellout of his life work, "Child PsychiatryRetrospect and Prospect," in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
It was in 1930 that Dr. Kanner founded the Johns Hopkins Children's Psychiatric Clinic, but it took a long time, he notes, for academic psychiatry to get over the old...