Victor of Aveyron

Victor of Aveyron (; ) was a French feral child who was found around the age of 9. Not only is he considered one of the most famous feral children, but his case is also the most documented case of a feral child. Upon his discovery, he was captured multiple times, running away from civilization approximately eight times. Eventually, his case was taken up by a physician, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, who worked with the boy for five years and gave him his name Victor. Itard was interested in determining what Victor could learn. He devised procedures to teach the boy words and recorded his progress. Based on his work with Victor, Itard broke new ground in the education of the developmentally delayed.

Early life

Victor was prepubescent when he was captured in 1800 but experienced puberty within a year or two. It is not known when or how he came to live in the woods near Saint-Sernin-sur-Rance, though he was reportedly seen there around 1795, in a state that suggested he'd already spent more than two years in the wild. In 1797, he was spotted by three hunters; he ran from them, but they were able to catch him when he tried to climb a tree. They brought him to a nearby town where he was cared for by a widow. However, he soon escaped and returned to the woods; he was periodically spotted in 1798 and 1799.

On 8 January 1800, he emerged from the forests on his own. His age was unknown, but citizens of the village estimated his age to be about 12. His lack of speech, as well as his food preferences and the numerous scars on his body, suggested to some that he had been in the wild for most of his life.

He was recorded to have a total of 23 scars, consisting of 18 on his body, 4 on his face, and one on his neck that indicated somebody had attempted to slit his throat many years ago.

Discovery

In 1797, a child of around nine or ten years of age was sighted in Tarn. Two years later, he was caught by some men and dogs, escorted to the village of Lacaune, and taken in by a widow. He ate nothing except for raw vegetables or vegetables he cooked himself. He ran away after a week.

In the winter of 1799, he went from Tarn to Aveyron. On the 6th or 8th of January 1800, he was spotted naked, stooped and with tousled hair by three shoemakers, who took him out of the woods. He ran away, left the woods and was discovered a week later at a dyer's house in Saint-Sernin-sur-Rance. He did not speak and his movements were chaotic. According to the philosopher François Dagognet, "he walks on four legs, eats plants, is hairy, deaf and mute." He was sent to an orphanage at Saint-Affrique three days later, then to another at Rodez on 4 February. The psychiatrist Philippe Pinel, doctor at the Bicêtre Hospital, wrote a report on Victor and considered him to be mentally ill and an idiot from birth (in that era, the term idiot was used to describe individuals with intellectual disabilities).

Study

thumb|right|Victor of Aveyron

Shortly after Victor was found, a local abbot and biology professor, Pierre Joseph Bonnaterre, examined him. He removed the boy's clothing and led him outside into the snow, where, far from being upset, Victor began to frolic about in the nude, showing Bonnaterre that he was clearly accustomed to exposure and cold. The local government commissioner, Constans-Saint-Esteve, also observed the boy and wrote there was "something extraordinary in his behavior, which makes him seem close to the state of wild animals".

The boy was eventually taken to Rodez, where two men, who had each lost their sons during the French Revolution, travelled to find out whether he was their missing son. However, neither claimed the boy. There were other rumours regarding Victor's origins. For example, one rumour insisted that the boy was the illegitimate son of a notaire abandoned at a young age because he was mute.

It was clear that Victor could hear, but he was taken to the National Institute of the Deaf in Paris for the purpose of being studied by Roch-Ambroise Cucurron Sicard. Sicard and other members of the Society of Observers of Man believed that by studying, as well as educating the boy, they would gain the proof they needed for the recently popularized empiricist theory of knowledge. It was hoped that by studying the wild boy, this idea would gain support. As such, Victor became a case study in the Enlightenment debate about the differences between humans and other animals.

At that time, the scientific category Juvenis averionensis was used, as a special case of the Homo ferus, described by Carl Linnaeus in Systema Naturae. Linnaeus and his discoveries, then, forced people to ask the question, "What makes us [human]?" Another developing idea prevalent during the Enlightenment was that of the noble savage. Some believed a person existing in the pure state of nature would be "gentle, innocent, a lover of solitude, ignorant of evil and incapable of causing intentional harm."

Philosophies proposed by Rousseau, Locke and Descartes were evolving around the time the boy was discovered in France in 1800. These philosophies invariably influenced the way the boy was perceived by others, and eventually, how Itard would structure his education.

Education and later life

It was said that even though he had been exposed to society and education, Victor had made little progress at the institution under Sicard. Many people questioned his ability to learn because of his initial state, and as Yousef explains, "it is one thing to say that the [person] of nature is not yet fully human; it is quite another thing to say that the [person] of nature cannot become fully human." After Sicard became frustrated with the lack of progress made by the boy, he was left to roam the institution by himself, until Itard decided to take the boy into his home to keep reports and monitor his development.

Jean Marc Gaspard Itard

Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, a young medical student, effectively adopted Victor into his home and published reports on his progress. Itard believed two things separated humans from animals: empathy and language. He wanted to civilize Victor with the objectives of teaching him to speak and to communicate human emotion. Victor showed significant early progress in understanding language and reading simple words, but failed to progress beyond a rudimentary level. Itard wrote, "Under these circumstances his ear was not an organ for the appreciation of sounds, their articulations and their combinations; it was nothing but a simple means of self-preservation which warned of the approach of a dangerous animal or the fall of wild fruit." Itard gave the boy his name, picking Victor due to its emphasis on the "o" sound, to which Victor was highly responsive. It would seem, however, that Itard implemented more contemporary views when he was educating Victor. Rousseau appears to have believed "that natural association is based on reciprocally free and equal respect between people." This notion of how to educate and to teach was something that, although it did not produce the effects hoped for, did prove to be a step towards new systems of pedagogy. By attempting to learn about the boy who lived in nature, education could be restructured and characterized.

Itard has been recognized as the founder of "oral education of the deaf; the field of otolaryngology; the use of behavior modification with severely impaired children; and special education for the mentally and physically handicapped."

While Victor did not learn to speak the language that Itard tried to teach him, it seems that Victor did make progress in his behavior towards other people. At the Itard home, housekeeper Madame Guérin was setting the table one evening while crying over the loss of her husband. Victor stopped what he was doing and displayed consoling behavior towards her. Itard reported on this progress.

Language

When looking at the association between language and intellect, French society considered one with the other. Unless cared for by friends or family, the mute routinely ended up in horrible, ghastly conditions. However, around 1750, a French priest, Charles-Michel de l'Épée, created the Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris

to educate the deaf and mute. His institution was made into a National Institute in 1790. This new interest and moral obligation towards the deaf and mute inspired Itard to nurture and attempt to teach Victor language. "He had Locke's and Condillac's theory that we are born with empty heads and that our ideas arise from what we perceive and experience. Having experienced almost nothing of society, the boy remained a savage." Serge Aroles, in his book L'énigme des enfants-loups (The Mystery of the Wolf-Children), also believes that surviving accounts of his behavior point to "a moderate degree of autism" (autisme moderé) in Victor's case.

Evidence that Victor may have been autistic can also be found in Dr Itard's writings. Despite being mostly mute, the boy was intelligent — it took him just four days to learn to say "milk" — so his lifelong silence went unexplained. Though never being taught sign language, he was still able to adapt to explicit non-verbal communication. He exhibited stimming-adjacent behaviours such as rocking back and forth, wringing his hands, pacing, thrashing and tucking his hands into the pockets of his waistcoat. When angry or overwhelmed, he would often fall to the floor with "violent convulsions" that "left him in a state of complete sensory collapse." He was noticed to have a great fondness of order and routine that would distress him when not carried out to his liking. He also had no reaction to extremes in temperature, to the extent where he could touch boiling water or hot coals with no pain, and roll around naked in the snow without any discomfort. The lattermost likely makes him an early recorded case of congenital insensitivity to pain, which can overlap with autism.

In March 2008, following the disclosure that Misha Defonseca's best-selling book, later turned into film Survivre avec les loups ('Survival with the Wolves'), was a hoax, there was a debate in the French media (newspapers, radio, and television) concerning the numerous uncritically believed false cases of feral children. Although there are numerous books on this subject, almost none of them have been based on archives, with the authors using rather dubious second- or third-hand, printed information. According to French surgeon Serge Aroles, author of a general study of the phenomenon of feral children based on archives,

References

External links

, originally broadcast 18 Oct. 1994, contains a segment about Victor