Kanner expressed a great deal of concern about the usual mistreatment of mentally disabled children. He expressed concern about a society that causes the intellectual haves to look down on the intellectual have-nots, which led many to look down on the mentally deficient child as an object of adult manipulations rather than as a human being who reacts to affection and hostility, to acceptance and rejection, to approval and disapproval, to patience and irritability as any other child would. This led to his major work in 1943, "Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact," published in 1943. In this paper, Kanner characterizes eleven cases, 3 girls and 8 boys, and would later call his observations 'autism'.