VICTOR OF AVEYRON
One of the earliest documented cases of so-called feral children is that of a boy known as Victor the “Wild Boy” of Aveyron. Victor lived in the Aveyron region of southern France and was found in 1800 after apparently growing up alone in the wild, cut off from society and human contact. He was twice spotted in the woods, captured and brought to town, but escaped both times. He emerged from the woods on his own in 1800 and wandered into a tanner's workshop in the village of Saint-Sernin.
He was put under the care of a 26-year-old physician named Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard. Itard worked with Victor for six years, teaching him to read simple words and to utter a few syllables, although he never really learned to speak. At first Victor was believed to be deaf due to his unresponsiveness to speech. However, Itard observed that he was responsive to other noises, such as the bark of a dog or the cracking of a walnut, and concluded that his hearing had developed as “simply an instrument of self preservation which informed him of the approach of a dangerous animal, or the fall of some wild fruit.” Although he was not deaf, he was taken to the National Institute for the Deaf in Paris for observation by notable instructor Roch-Ambroise Cucurron Sicard. He was scrutinized in the hopes that his behavior would reveal something about human nature and the development of human thoughts and ideas. Itard's extensive diary about Victor later inspired a film by Francois Truffaut called “The Wild Child” .
In these notes Victor is described as not truly human. Itard writes, “his whole existence was a life purely animal,” and notes that his only interests seemed to be eating, drinking, sleeping and running in the fields. He was seemingly indifferent to human relationships or contact. One incident is described in which Victor ran, naked, into the snow, happily and seemingly indifferent to the cold. Itard deduced from this that our sensitivity to temperature is not innate but rather formed and influenced by our life experiences.
Itard's observations were no doubt influenced by popular writing and ideas of the time put forth by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Among Men in which he asserts that, “Savage man, left by Nature to bare instinctalone will then begin with purely animal functions… His desires do not exceed his physical needs; the only goods he knows in the Universe are food, a female, and rest.” Victor's arrival coincided with the Enlightenment period, in which many thinkers were examining the meaning of human nature and debating what makes us human and separates man from beasts. There was a fascination at the time with feral children, whom Carl Linnaeus classified as a separate species of human being called homo sapiens ferus.
How or why Victor came to live in the woods was never known; however, he was covered in scars that were examined and speculated about—particularly a large vertical scar across his throat seemingly inflicted by a knife. Speculations about abandonment or botched infanticide followed.
Victor's progress slowed and Itard abandoned his studies, declaring the attempt to teach him language a failure. Victor went on to live with Itard's governess, a nurse named Madame Guérin, who cared for him and was a maternal figure until his death in 1828.
This early example of a feral child was influential in the study of the education of developmentally delayed children. Other feral children have been discovered and written about more recently—most notably Little Genie, a girl who was discovered in the United States in 1970 having lived in near isolation for the first thirteen years of her life. Studying Victor allowed researchers to make inferences about human nature, language development, and the effects of isolation and life in the wild on human behavior and development.