Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron

1801

Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard (1774–1838)

On a cold January day in 1800, a naked boy wandered shivering into a farmhouse in the south of France. Although he appeared to be about twelve years old, he could not speak, knew no human manners, and could not recognize his own reflection. It soon became clear that he had been living alone in the forests for several years, probably since about the age of five. As a feral child, Victor became a case study in the Enlightenment debates about the noble savage and the role of education in the civilizing process.

Victor was taken to Paris, where he was inspected by several experts, one of whom declared him a “congenital idiot.” Not long afterward, Victor came under the care of the physician Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, who at the time was the director of the National Institute for Deaf-Mutes. Itard disagreed with the previous diagnosis, as he believed that the deficits Victor displayed were social in origin and could be remediated through socialization and education. Thus Victor became a test case for the power of education.

For five years, Itard and his assistant worked with Victor to teach him language and the ways of civilized life. He learned to eat prepared food, to dress properly, and to bathe. However, he never learned to speak. Itard had discovered what later experimental science has shown: there is a critical period for learning language, and once that period has passed, language is very difficult to learn.

On a conceptual level, Itard and Victor represented a new approach to studying human development. Itard prepared two reports on Victor, one in 1801 and another in 1806. Although Itard reluctantly concluded that his efforts to educate Victor had failed, his systematic methods were lauded by the French minister of education. The minister hailed Itard’s reports as a new scientific approach to studying children that would also point the way to helpful interventions.

SEE ALSO Rousseau’s Natural Child (1762), Kindergarten (1840), Casa dei Bambini (1907)

A thirteenth-century bronze sculpture of the Capitoline Wolf suckling twin infants Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome.