Itard, Jean Marc Gaspard (1774–1838)

French physician

Jean Marc Gaspard Itard was born in Oraison near Digne in southern France in 1774. He was charged by Lucien Bonaparte, interior minister during the Consulate, and by Abbé Sicard, director of the Institute for Deaf-Mutes on the Rue Saint-Jacques in Paris, with the care of a boy who had just arrived, in July 1800, and who was already being called “the wild boy of Aveyron.” Itard undertook to teach him to speak and to civilize him, rejecting the diagnosis of idiocy made by Philippe Pinel, the famous specialist in mental disorders at the Salpêtrière asylum.

Contrary to Pinel, Itard judged that the wild boy had not acquired the benefits of civilization because he had been isolated in the forest without human contact. Dealing with a natural being, he thought that through education—the fundamental empirical concept—he could “return him to society,” as the celebrated Sicard was doing with deaf-mutes. To achieve this, Itard employed methods intended for the deaf. These methods failed, however, since the wild child was very different from them. More different, in fact, than he would have thought, since we now know that early alterations in the brain are not, or are hardly ever, open to modification.

After some years of fruitless efforts, Chaptal, Napoleon's interior minister, suspended the financial support that had until then been given for the education of “Victor,” so named because he had learned at least to sound the letter O. Itard then turned back to the deaf, for whom he invented a method of physiological education to teach them to speak. Before his death in 1838, he supported Eduoard Séguin's efforts in treating and training the mentally impaired.

In 1970, French filmmaker François Truffaut wrote and directed The Wild Child, a film based on Itard's work.