In 1800, the boy of the title was a child of perhaps twelve or
thirteen who had been wandering alone in the mountainous forests of
southern France for an unknown time before his capture. Like other
children who have grown up without human contact, the lad, who was
later named Victor, behaved in peculiar ways. Most importantly, he
could not speak. Victor was discovered at a period when
philosophical investigations into human nature had begun to affect
medicine, psychology, and pedagogy. He was brought to Paris and
turned over to a young doctor, Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard… Dr. Lane
tells us how a whole new kind of education descends from Itard’s
lifework—first, the training of the physically handicapped, then
the training of the mentally retarded. (Before modern times, both
kinds of people were regarded as useless and unteachable.) Finally,
through Maria Montessori, Itard’s concepts were applied to teaching
ordinary youngsters, and Dr. Lane points out how his difficult
discoveries have become everyday assumptions. His book is an
exceptionally readable, intelligent monument to one of humanity’s
benefactors and to his successors, who carried on in Itard’s spirit
of scientific curiosity, kindness, and doggedness.
*New Yorker*
The Wild Boy of Aveyron represents a unique case of total cultural
deprivation, of mortal nakedness: a human being stripped of
education, custom, dignity, brotherhood, sex, almost of humanity
itself. Lane’s book succeeds in sustaining the human interest along
with scientific scrutiny. The intellectual space it occupies has
been empty too long.
*New York Times Book Review*
A brilliantly-researched history that really reads like a novel…a
model of living scholarship… It is a unique contribution to the
history of medicine, psychology, and education.
*Washington Post*
This charming and moving book raises, sometimes directly and
sometimes tangentially, important questions about the nature of
human beings.
*New Republic*
Harlan Lane does an engaging and at times compelling job… He uses
original documents, historical accounts, later scientific writings,
and not the least, his own capacity as a first-rate narrator to
tell us what the wild boy was like and what he prompted various
psychological and educational theorists—psychiatrists like
Phillippe Pinel or, later, physicians like Maria Montessori—to make
of man’s possibilities or limitations.
*Natural History*
A spectacular job of telling the thrilling story of the ‘enfant
sauvage’ and the ripples generated by his discovery that continue
to stimulate thinking nearly two centuries later.
*Human Behavior*
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