Leo Kanner, an Austrian émigré and medical graduate of the University of Berlin, founded the first academic department of child psychiatry under the direction of Adolf Meyer at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Kanner was the first U. S. physician to be identified as a child psychiatrist, and his textbook, Child Psychiatry (1935), introduced both the specialty and the term to the English speaking academic community.

The first historical monograph on rumination syndrome or merycism.

The first description of “early infantile autism” as a disorder marked by extreme detachment, self-isolation, inability to form relationships, frequent failure to acquire communicative abilities, and preoccupation with sameness.