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(Rapports et mémoires sur le sauvage de l'Aveyron)
Rapports et mémoires sur le sauvage de l'Aveyron
1 online resource (104 pages) : frontispiece (portrait)
"The scene of the very human story described in this book was laid in Paris at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. In these stirring times there lived at Paris a young medical man, Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, born in the provinces, who had early achieved some distinction in his profession and at the age of twenty-five was appointed physician to the new institution for deaf-mutes. In 1799, the year seven by the new calendar, there was published in the Journal des Db̌ats a letter by one Citizen Bonaterre, describing a wild boy taken in the woods of the Department of Aveyron. According to reports, the child was a specimen of primitive humanity. He had been found almost unclad, wandering about at the outskirts of the forest in which he had apparently lived for some years, a stranger to human kind, eking out a precarious existence as best he could. The boy was brought to Paris and soon became a nine days' wonder. People of all classes thronged to see him, expecting to find, as Rousseau had told them, a pattern of man as he was: "when wild in woods the noble savage ran." What they did see was a degraded being, human only in shape; a dirty, scarred, inarticulate creature who trotted and grunted like the beasts of the fields, ate with apparent pleasure the most filthy refuse, was apparently incapable of attention or even of elementary perceptions such as heat or cold, and spent his time apathetically rocking himself backwards and forwards like the animals at the zoo. A "mananimal, " whose only concern was to eat, sleep, and escape the unwelcome attentions of sightseers. Expert opinion was as usual somewhat derisive of popular attitude and expectations. The great Pinel examined the boy, declaring that his wildness was a fake and that he was an incurable idiot. Among those who saw the child was the young Itard, who, fired with the notion that science, particularly medical science, was all-powerful, and perhaps believing that his older colleague was too conservative in applying his own principle of the curability of mental disease, came to the conclusion that the boy's condition was curable. The apparent subnormality Itard attributed to the fact that the child had lacked that intercourse with other human beings and that general experience which is an essential part of the training of a normal civilized person. This diagnosis Itard was prepared to back by an attempt at treatment, and the boy was consequently placed under the young doctor's care at the institution over which he presided. Of the immediate success of Itard's work there is no question. In place of the hideous creature that was brought to Paris, there was to be seen after two years' instruction an "almost normal child who could not speak, " but who lived like a human being; clean, affectionate, even able to read a few words and to understand much that was said to him"--Introduction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved).
by Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard ; translated by George and Muriel Humphrey, with an introduction by George Humphrey.
Translation of: Rapports et mémoires sur le sauvage de l'Aveyron.
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