Victor of Aveyron

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (October 2006)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

Victor of Aveyron (also The Wild Boy of Aveyron) was a boy who apparently lived his entire childhood alone in the woods before being found wandering the woods near Saint-Sernin-sur-Rance, France (near Toulouse) in 1797. He was captured, but soon escaped. He was then captured again and kept in the care of a local woman for about a week before he escaped once more.

However, on January 8, 1800, he emerged from the forests on his own, perhaps habituated to human kindness after his second experience. His age was unknown but citizens of the village estimated that he was about twelve years old. His lack of speech, as well as his food preferences and the numerous scars on his body, indicated that he had been in the wild for the majority of his life. This remarkable situation came about at the end of the Enlightenment, when many were debating what exactly distinguished man from animal. One of the prevailing opinions involved the ability to learn language; it was hoped that by studying the wild boy, they would learn the answer.

Shortly after Victor's amazing discovery, 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. This indicated to some that human reaction to temperature is greatly a result of conditioning and experience.

Despite the fact that he could hear, Victor was taken to the National Institute of the Deaf for the purpose of study (this was an age in which deaf people were often seen as "mute"). He became a case study in the Enlightenment debate about the differences between humans and animals.

Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, a young medical student, took on the remarkable case as his own. Itard believed that two things separated humans from animals: empathy and language. He wanted to be the first person to fully civilize a wild child and attempted, primarily, to teach Victor to speak and show human emotion. Though initially successful — Victor showed significant progress, at least, in understanding language and reading simple words — he eventually slowed down to the point that Itard abandoned the experiment. The only words that Victor ever actually learned to speak were lait (milk) and Oh Dieu (oh God). Modern scholars now believe, partly by studying such feral children, that language acquisition must take place in a critical period of early childhood if it is to be successful. Though Itard failed at teaching Victor language he had a breakthrough emotionally.

Victor lived with Itard and his housekeeper Madame Guérin. One night, while setting the table, Victor noticed Madame Guerin crying over the loss of her husband; he stopped what he was doing and consoled her, thus showing empathy. Itard took this as a major breakthrough in the case proving that the wild child was capable of human emotions.

The Wild Boy of Aveyron died in Paris in 1828.

For a long time, the scientific category Juvenis averionensis was used, as a special case of the Homo Ferus^[1], described by Carl von Linné in Systema Naturae.

Victor's life was dramatized in François Truffaut's 1970 film l'Enfant Sauvage (marketed in the UK as The Wild Boy and in the US as The Wild Child).

In March 2008, following the disclosure that the Misha Defonseca best-selling book, later turned into film, Survivre avec les loups (Survival with wolves) was a swindle, there was an important debate in the French media (newspapers, radio and even on television) concerning the numerous false cases of feral children blindly accredited: although there are numerous books on this subject, almost none of them have been based on archives, the authors using rather dubious second or third-hand printed informations. According to French surgeon Serge Aroles, who has written a general study of feral children based on archives (L'énigme des enfants-loups (The enigma of wolf-children), 2007), almost all of these cases are either scandalous swindles or totally fictitious stories.

According to Aroles, who gives several clues in chapter XXXI of his book, Victor of Aveyron is not a genuine feral child. "Don't forget that Truffaut's movie is ... a movie !" And, something worse, according to Aroles, the scars on the body of Victor were not the consequences of a wild life in the forests, but rather of physical abuse.

[edit] Notes

^ Dr. E. C. Séguin: Idiocy: And it's treatment by the physiological method], 1907.

[edit] Further reading

Harlan Lane (1975). The Wild Boy of Aveyron. (Hardcover ISBN 0-674-95282-0 & Paperback ISBN 0-674-95300-2) Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
R. Shattuck (1980). The Forbidden Experiment: the Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron. New York: Kodansha International.
For an opportune critical approach based on archives : Serge Aroles, L'Enigme des enfants-loups (The Enigma of wolf-children), chap. XXXI ; 2007, ISBN 2748339096.