Each night O’Reilly threw a massive party with an open bar, country music, arcades, a rock-climbing wall, and almost every entertainment item possible over the course of two nights, Friday and Saturday. On Friday night we were called for a patient complaining of chest pains in the party hall, when we got there, he told us he gets these pains once or twice a year and his cardiologist told him to take Advil for the pain. We asked him to come back with us to our medical room where we can get a better look at him but, he was refusing. It is venue policy that if any medical emergency occurs, the patient must have an examination by us, or he will be removed from the venue. I eventually convinced the patient to come with us and during our conversation I was able to tell that he may have Autism or Asperger’s, I strongly believe it was the latter. When we brought our patient back to our room, we found his vitals to be normal except for the usual, an elevated blood pressure. The patient refused to go to the hospital and told us he was feeling much better and wanted to go to his hotel room. We couldn’t keep him longer, so we let him go on his way.
The next morning, we get a call that a patient is down on the ground and what they said was he was “semi-unresponsive” and is “clenching his chest in immense pain”. My team and I thought we were about to get a cardiac arrest case, so we rushed towards the patient’s location. When we arrived there luckily the patient’s conditions had improved and was no sign of an imminent heart attack. When I got closer to the patient it was the same person as last night! One of his piers had told me he drank three Red Bulls this morning and that he was also feeling very anxious about the crowd. As we brought the second time patient back to our room to check on him, he refused to go to the hospital and wanted to go back to his room. We advised him that he should go to the hospital and if he does get ahold of his cardiologist, get a prescription for Nitroglycerin or doctor’s recommendation.
This patient had a running blood pressure of over 190/90, highly caffeinated, and I believed he had Asperger’s which, did not let him feel his best in a large crowd. His anxiety may have taken over and exacerbated an underlying heart problem or triggered the chest pains he gets once or twice a year along with his accelerated heart rate due to heavy caffeination. Maybe if he was normal, he would be able to cope with the stress better and not let his anxiety mix with his obesity and lead to a close infarction of the heart.
Asperger’s has a very recent history dating back to its discovery by an Austrian doctor, Dr. Hans Asperger in the 1940s. German Nazi rule was a time when people were murdered for having mental deficiencies and Dr. Asperger was an Austrian pediatrician who worked with those type of patients. Dr. Asperger was able to have patient contact with many individuals with autism until he found a difference in many of his supposed autistic patients. In Dr. Asperger’s work he noticed that some of his patients had good language and cognitive skills, this resulted in him separating them from autism and into Asperger’s.
Normally when we think about Nazi doctors or scientists in World War Two, we assume they are hell bent on torturing patients and conducting unethical human experimentation that would lead to scientific breakthroughs. In 1938 when the Anschluss of Austria occurred, there is no evidence that Dr. Asperger aligned himself with the NADSP or its paramilitary groups. Instead, he joined local groups that had allegiance to the NADSP but not directly apart of. Dr. Asperger’s Ideology believed that the Euthanasia program that the Nazi party infamously carried out was wasting resources. Dr. Asperger’s thought that many of those who are eligible to be murdered can still be used in the work force in the fatherland as Germany was facing a large shortage of workers. Many patients in Asperger’s clinic would have been euthanized in other Nazi clinics but Dr. Asperger gave them titles such as “difficult” which gave the Nazi reason that they should not be executed.
It can be inferred Dr. Hans Asperger did not want any part of the Nazi genocide program as there is a story of him protecting a Jewish boy during the Nazi regime. Dr. Asperger did the bare minimum to stay on the good side of the Nazi party but, most likely went against his values for the sake of his own life. Many people think that the Asperger’s illness has a tainted history, it doesn’t. The name should be kept as a reminder for us to keep awareness of its origins.
Sources:
Czech, Herwig. “Hans Asperger, National Socialism, and ‘Race Hygiene’ in Nazi-Era Vienna – Molecular Autism.” BioMed Central, BioMed Central, 21 June 2021, https://molecularautism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13229-018-0208-6.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/euthanasia-program.
The Medical Humanist 
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