The Forbidden Experiment (Kodansha Globe)

The next day, the gendarmes took the boy to a hospice in a nearby town. From there, writes the historian and literary scholar Roger Shattuck, his path took this "prisoner without a crime," now called Victor, into the studies and laboratories of revolutionary France, where the boy presented a rare homegrown instance of Rousseau's "noble savage" to the civilized world. Much scholarly and scientific debate surrounded him. Finally, Victor, now famed as the "wild boy of Aveyron," came under the care of a sympathetic young doctor who concluded that Victor was in fact an abandoned deaf-mute, intelligent but forlorn, who had somehow been able to survive on his own. Dismissed in a contemporary encyclopedia as "half wild" and "incapable of learning to speak in spite of all efforts to teach him," Victor was eventually forgotten. "A state pension kept him alive, like an animal in a zoo," writes Shattuck, "and when he died no one noticed." Scientific debate about his condition was renewed from time to time, however, and the story of the wild boy was influential in the development of several theories of language learning and human evolution. Shattuck's slender narrative is a fine work of scholarly detection, yielding an instructive episode in the history of science. --Gregory McNamee

Product Description
Just before dawn on January 9, 1800, a mysterious creature emerged from a forest in southern France. Although he was human in form and walked upright, his habits were those of a young male animal. He was wearing only a tattered shirt, but did not seem troubled by the cold. Showing no modesty about his nakedness, he ate greedily, seizing roasted potatoes from a hot fire. He seemed to have no language skills, only grunting occasionally. A cause celebre developed over the question of what should be done with this puzzling wild boy. People wondered: Could he learn to speak? Or be taught to eat with a knife and fork?

In THE FORBIDDEN EXPERIMENT, the award-winning cultural historian Roger Shattuck offers a captivating account of this fascinating episode in intellectual history. He examines the relationships that developed among the boy, soon named Victor; Madame Guerin, the woman who fed and washed him; and Itard, the tutor who defiled his colleagues who believed the boy was hopelessly retarded. Shattuck helps modern readers form many of the questions that still haunt parents, special education teachers, guidance counselors, and all students of human behavior to this day: How do children acquire language? How do deaf and mute children learn? Can children who have been neglected or abused ever learn to trust the world? Like a true-life tale of adventure rolled into a detective story, Roger Shattuck's riveting account of the Wild Boy of Aveyron is an unforgettable telling of one of history's greatest mystery stories.

"The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron" is a fascinating exploration of what it means to be human and how our humanity is, in a sense, created by the society in which we live, defined by our communications and relationships with others. In telling this story, Roger Shattuck has thoughtfully and sympathetically interwoven the factual story of the Wild Boy with the philosophical, psychological and historical background that ultimately makes this story so interesting. Thus, Shattuck explores the historical peculiarities of the Languedoc region from which the Wild Boy came (known for the poetry and song of the troubadors, as well as the Albigensian heresy), the historical forces which made him such a topic of interest (he was a boy seemingly straight from Rousseau's state of nature at a time when the French Revolution had given way to Napoleon), and the philosophical and psychological forerunners (Locke, Condillac, Rousseau) that provided the intellectual impetus for marking this "tabula rasa" of humanity. Shattuck's book also provides interesting appendices containing other published accounts of the Wild Boy of Aveyron, other cases of isolation and deprivation (including Kaspar Hauser, Peter of Hanover, The Elephant Man, and Helen Keller), and a short essay on Francois Truffaut's 1970 film, "The Wild Child," which is based upon the story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron.

While simple in the telling, "The Forbidden Experiment" is a book which poses the deepest and most enigmatic of questions, the question of what it means to be human. Read it, ponder it, learn from it.


Thoughtful, Sympathetic Story of What It Means to be Human   July 27, 2002
 7 out of 7 found this review helpful

In January, 1800, a boy of about eleven or twelve years old walked out of the woods near the village of Saint-Sernin in the Languedoc region of southern France. Except for a tattered shirt, he was naked. He had no shame or concern for his nakedness and had no ability to speak. He made only strange and apparently meaningless sounds and cries. While human in appearance, he lacked any qualities which otherwise would suggest that he was part of any human society.

The boy was captured by a villager, transported and kept for several months in an orphanage in a nearby town, and eventually transferred to Paris in June, 1800, where "The Wild Boy of Aveyron" was claimed "for science and humanity" by the newly-formed Society of Observers of Man. In Paris, the boy was given over to the Abbe Sicard, a famous educator and the head of the Institute for Deaf-Mutes. "Miracles were expected of Sicard, for some of his deaf-mute pupils had made a reputation by their intelligence and wit in answering written questions before large audiences." Sicard, however, apparently believed that he could never train the seemingly wild creature and made no efforts to do so. Instead, he left the boy to run wild at the Institute and a commission appointed by the Society of the Observers of Man subsequently declared him to be an incurable idiot.

It is at this point, however, sometime in the summer or fall of 1800, that the course of the Wild Boy's life took a different course. A twenty-five year old medical student, Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard began working at the Institute and became interested in the boy. More or less simultaneously with the declaration by the Society of the Observers of Man that the boy was an incurable idiot in November of that year, Itard was hired and given a room at the Institute for the sole purpose of working with the boy. Itard named the boy Victor and went on, over the course of the next six years and with the able assistance of a motherly figure by the name of Madame Guerin, to train the boy in accordance with principles Itard had derived from the writings of Locke and Condillac. These principles were intended to give the boy the ability to respond to other people, to train his senses, to extend his physical and social needs, to teach him to speak, and to teach him to think and reason logically. While Itard was never fully successful in achieving all of his objectives, his work was remarkably original and his observations and experiments have left the world with a fascinating picture of the Wild Boy of Aveyron.

"The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron" is a fascinating exploration of what it means to be human and how our humanity is, in a sense, created by the society in which we live, defined by our communications and relationships with others. In telling this story, Roger Shattuck has thoughtfully and sympathetically interwoven the factual story of the Wild Boy with the philosophical, psychological and historical background that ultimately makes this story so interesting. Thus, Shattuck explores the historical peculiarities of the Languedoc region from which the Wild Boy came (known for the poetry and song of the troubadors, as well as the Albigensian heresy), the historical forces which made him such a topic of interest (he was a boy seemingly straight from Rousseau's state of nature at a time when the French Revolution had given way to Napoleon), and the philosophical and psychological forerunners (Locke, Condillac, Rousseau) that provided the intellectual impetus for marking this "tabula rasa" of humanity. Shattuck's book also provides interesting appendices containing other published accounts of the Wild Boy of Aveyron, other cases of isolation and deprivation (including Kaspar Hauser, Peter of Hanover, The Elephant Man, and Helen Keller), and a short essay on Francois Truffaut's 1970 film, "The Wild Child," which is based upon the story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron.

While simple in the telling, "The Forbidden Experiment" is a book which poses the deepest and most enigmatic of questions, the question of what it means to be human. Read it, ponder it, learn from it.


Thoughtful, Sympathetic Story of What It Means to be Human   August 30, 2001
 6 out of 6 found this review helpful

In January, 1800, a boy of about eleven or twelve years old walked out of the woods near the village of Saint-Sernin in the Languedoc region of southern France. Except for a tattered shirt, he was naked. He had no shame or concern for his nakedness and had no ability to speak. He made only strange and apparently meaningless sounds and cries. While human in appearance, he lacked any qualities which otherwise would suggest that he was part of any human society.

The boy was captured by a villager, transported and kept for several months in an orphanage in a nearby town, and eventually transferred to Paris in June, 1800, where "The Wild Boy of Aveyron" was claimed "for science and humanity" by the newly-formed Society of Observers of Man. In Paris, the boy was given over to the Abbe Sicard, a famous educator and the head of the Institute for Deaf-Mutes. "Miracles were expected of Sicard, for some of his deaf-mute pupils had made a reputation by their intelligence and wit in answering written questions before large audiences." Sicard, however, apparently believed that he could never train the seemingly wild creature and made no efforts to do so. Instead, he left the boy to run wild at the Institute and a commission appointed by the Society of the Observers of Man subsequently declared him to be an incurable idiot.

It is at this point, however, sometime in the summer or fall of 1800, that the course of the Wild Boy's life took a different course. A twenty-five year old medical student, Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard began working at the Institute and became interested in the boy. More or less simultaneously with the declaration by the Society of the Observers of Man that the boy was an incurable idiot in November of that year, Itard was hired and given a room at the Institute for the sole purpose of working with the boy. Itard named the boy Victor and went on, over the course of the next six years and with the able assistance of a motherly figure by the name of Madame Guerin, to train the boy in accordance with principles Itard had derived from the writings of Locke and Condillac. These principles were intended to give the boy the ability to respond to other people, to train his senses, to extend his physical and social needs, to teach him to speak, and to teach him to think and reason logically. While Itard was never fully successful in achieving all of his objectives, his work was remarkably original and his observations and experiments have left the world with a fascinating picture of the Wild Boy of Aveyron.

"The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron" is a fascinating exploration of what it means to be human and how our humanity is, in a sense, created by the society in which we live, defined by our communications and relationships with others. In telling this story, Roger Shattuck has thoughtfully and sympathetically interwoven the factual story of the Wild Boy with the philosophical, psychological and historical background that ultimately makes this story so interesting. Thus, Shattuck explores the historical peculiarities of the Languedoc region from which the Wild Boy came (known for the poetry and song of the troubadors, as well as the Albigensian heresy), the historical forces which made him such a topic of interest (he was a boy seemingly straight from Rousseau's state of nature at a time when the French Revolution had given way to Napoleon), and the philosophical and psychological forerunners (Locke, Condillac, Rousseau) that provided the intellectual impetus for marking this "tabula rasa" of humanity. Shattuck's book also provides interesting appendices containing other published accounts of the Wild Boy of Aveyron, other cases of isolation and deprivation (including Kaspar Hauser, Peter of Hanover, The Elephant Man, and Helen Keller), and a short essay on Francois Truffaut's 1970 film, "The Wild Child," which is based upon the story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron.

While simple in the telling, "The Forbidden Experiment" is a book which poses the deepest and most enigmatic of questions, the question of what it means to be human. Read it, ponder it, learn from it.


A beautiful, poignant account   July 11, 1999
 13 out of 13 found this review helpful

Shattuck writes a beautiful, poignant account about an event that forever influenced the course of modern day psychology. Shattuck not only discusses "Victor" himself (behavior, reactions, etc.), but also discusses the recupercusions his capture, attempted treatment, and attempted enculturalization had philosophically, morally, and psychologically. This is definitely a well written, well researched, 3-dimensional book. It explores the subject on every level possible.