Leo Kanner was an Austrian-American psychiatrist, physician, and social activist best known for his work related to infantile autism. Before working at the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Kanner practiced as a physician in Germany and South Dakota. In 1943, Kanner published his landmark paper Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact, describing 11 children who displayed "a powerful desire for aloneness" and "an obsessive insistence on persistent sameness." He named their condition "early infantile autism". Kanner was in charge of developing the first child psychiatry clinic in the United States and later served as the Chief of Child Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He is one of the co-founders of The Children's Guild, a nonprofit organization serving children, families and child-serving organizations throughout Maryland and Washington, D.C., and dedicated to "Transforming how America Cares for and Educates its Children and Youth." He is widely considered one of the most influential American psychiatrists of the 20th century.

The Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic is a psychiatric school and clinic in Baltimore, Maryland. Proposed in 1908 as the first of its kind in the United States, the clinic opened on April 16, 1913 as a new section of Johns Hopkins Hospital. After a visit to the hospital to check on his other investments in the Phipps Tuberculosis Dispensary, Henry Phipps decided to donate $1.5 million to fund psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. William Welch, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, quickly appointed Adolf Meyer as the director of the clinic, a renowned psychiatrist at the time.