Feral Children

Before the seventeenth century, outside of myth and legend, only scattered and fragmented stories of feral or wild children appear in European history. Suddenly, during the 1600s, several accounts emerge; there are descriptions of a wolf boy in Germany and children abducted by bears in Poland; and, in 1644, the first story appears in English of John of Liège, a boy lost by his parents in the woods who took on animal-like behaviors to survive on his own for years. Early descriptions of such children detailed their nonhuman qualities: running on all fours, foraging and hunting for food, exceptional hearing, and absence of language. As several such children were rescued from the wild and brought back into human society, their continued animalistic behavior coupled with a seeming inability to master language fascinated philosophers, who began to wonder if such children actually belonged to a different species than the human family.

This question was taken up with great seriousness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as science attempted to name, classify, and understand the intricacies of the natural world and human development. The most widely known feral child of the early eighteenth century was a boy found in Hanover in 1724. Peter the Wild Boy—as the famous Dr. Arbuthnot named him—became a fascination of the English royalty, living for the next few years both with King George I and the Prince of Wales. Like earlier children found in the wilderness, however, Peter's unbreakable silence and unique ability to survive much as an animal would compelled scientists to address this animal-human divide. Within a decade of Peter's discovery, Carl Linnæus, the hugely influential natural historian, actually included feral man, homo ferens, as one of six distinct human species. Notably, ferens is the only classification listing individuals—rather than whole races—as examples.

In the 1792 translation of Linnæus's Natural Systems into English, however, a note was added that such children were probably “idiots” who had been abandoned or had strayed from their families. It was this conflation of feral nature and disability that was taken up by Jean Marc Gaspard Itard in his project of civilizing one of the most famous cases in Europe, Victor of Aveyron, a wild boy caught in 1800 in the forests near Lacaune. Philippe Pinel, the foremost physician in France, dismissed Victor as an “idiot,” but to Itard, the boy was a living artifact—an atavistic body on which to test Rousseau's notions of original perfection against a belief in language as the only means through which human identity could be forged. After several years of training, however, Victor was still unable to use language, a failure that further solidified an understanding of feral children as mentally “infantile” and “inferior.”

In many ways, the systematic education, training, and confinement of cognitively disabled people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew on the legacy of “civilizing” projects taken up by teachers of [Page 726]feral children. Building on the techniques of Itard, for example, Eduoard Séguin promoted repetitious physical and mental training processes for “feebleminded” children—training systems that were further developed by eugenicists in Europe and the United States. During the twentieth century, as psychologists endeavored to distinguish between behaviorism and biological nature, wild children—a designation including children in isolation as well as those who survived among animals—again seemed to provide a key to the puzzle. A pervasive assumption that such children are abandoned or confined by their parents because of apparent cognitive impairments remained entrenched until the later decades of the century.

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