Winner of the Fall 2017 StMU History Media Award for
Best Explanatory Article
The Jungle Book is one of the most iconic Disney movies of all time. It’s a story about a young boy named Mowgli, who was raised in the jungle by wolves after his parents were killed by a tiger named Shere Khan. As Mowgli grew older he began to form a timeless bond with his best friend Baloo, and they went on wild adventures together. This story has captivated audiences since 1967. But long before the Bear Necessities, on January 9th, 1800 in Aveyron, France, a real child was discovered in the woods. He was found walked erect and completely naked except for a mangled shirt that showed no modesty. But, unlike Mowgli and his jungle friends, the young boy wasn’t able to communicate with anyone except in strange, meaningless cries. The young boy appeared to be between the ages of six and eight, with no evidence of having had any previous human encounters, and no real certainty on how he had been surviving. The local authorities sent him to an orphanage, but he escaped. He was then found again, and scientists began to take an interest in this “unfortunate being” who was “unhousebroken.” So Jean Marc Gaspard Itard and his team took the boy and began a series of experiments on him to see if this “savage” could be domesticated.1
After taking the young child in, Itard began to observe the different things he had taught himself to do to survive. In one instance, the young boy was sitting by a fire and grabbed a potato out of a boiling pot. When a man tried to get him to let it cool, he scarfed it down. As time passed, he ate it faster and refused to rationalize with the people that were trying to interact with him.2 Shortly after these observations began, word traveled rapidly of a wild savage found in Aveyron, France. Scientists, psychologists, and even Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother were interested in meeting the child. Lucien Bonaparte sent a letter to Itard in Aveyron stating, “I want the boy here and instruct you to send him without delay.”3
After they took him to Paris, some scientists wanted to conduct experiments on him to see if they could “domesticate” him. Some psychologists and scientists argued that it was a selfish thing to do. They also did not believe that the child should be domesticated just because he had all five senses. These professionals felt that it was morally wrong to try to force the young boy to learn skills even though his desires did not stretch beyond his own physical needs.4
Although there was a lot of disapproval received from other scientists due to the conducting of experiments on this boy, they continued to try to help him progress towards domestication. These efforts were partly due to the world-view of these scientists, namely the world-view of the French Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. In this period, the ideals of the Enlightenment pervaded French society. It gave the intellectual elite of France confidence that, through applied science, France could perfect its social, political, and economic institutions. So, as Itard and his team began to help this boy talk, and read, and express himself more civilized, they were doing that applied science that was leading French society toward its perfected goal. This particular concept of perfection seemed very attainable to many French people. They were just emerging from a decade-long political experiment of the French Revolution, where the goals of liberty, equality, and brotherhood were on the lips of all. And now, with a certain order restored by Napoleon, the business of perfecting society could advance in smoother form. The restructuring of the French law code under the Napoleonic Code assured all French citizens the equal protection under the law and illustrates the ideals of the Enlightenment, that a scientific understanding of citizenship and law required this egalitarian view of both. So it was because of these fundamental ideals of applying science to social and political institutions for their improvement that the young boy was helped my Itard and his team. While these same ideals led some to the formation of micro-utopias, such as feminist, socialist, and Christian utopian experiments, for others it meant medical experimentation using shock therapy, and other experiments like the ones conducted on the “Young Savage of Aveyron” in order to help fix him. This idea of “correcting” or “fixing” individual’s flaws flows naturally from the same Enlightenment ideals that fostered “fixing” the political institutions of the ancien regime, the illness being a monarchy and the “fix” being republicanism. Victor gave the French a way to test the foundations of the social, educational, and philosophical institutions that were being formed. This time period brought hope to humanity, hope for growth, belief in change, and who better to be the poster child for this fundamental belief than a wild boy’s domestication.5
As Itard and his team continued testing the “Wild Boy of Aveyron,” they moved him to a Deaf and Mute institution in the hope that it would help him progress faster in learning how to communicate and express himself to others. Many months passed, however, with very little progress for him. In fact, they had come to realize that the young boy’s eyesight was heavily impaired, so much so that he could not tell the difference between a painted object and the real thing. Doctors also found that his coordination could be compared to that of a retarded child’s.6
After months of tests, most of Itard’s colleagues and other researchers all seemed to agree that the young boy had “incurable idiocy.” It was after these results that many scientists began to reject the idea of domesticating the boy at all. Many scientists in France thought the idea of domesticating this “idiot savage” was really an intangible goal; this was primarily due to the childhood development theory of this period.7 Their conclusions came about due to the parallel of Native American studies and research on how so-called primitive people react to being colonized by the French. These studies concluded that Native Americans and other people from primitive societies were limited in how much they can learn and how far they can progress toward fully civilized behavior. Itard’s colleagues believed that there must be a parallel between the way that natives are innately limited and way that this feral child is limited. It was discovered that they both tended to have the same natural instincts and selfish behaviors. These selfish and primitive behaviors are said to have been developing since the boy was young and they were taught due to the environment he was raised in, much like the Natives. This led scientists to believe he was too old and to accustom to his lifestyle to ever be able to adapt to the French civilized way of life. This was mainly due to the fact that social scientists believed it was the parental roles in our lives that help form the nature of who we are, and at a certain age they believe our ability to change who we are at the core becomes less likely. Scientists not on Itard’s team deemed that, due to the age and mental state they saw him in, it just did not seem logical that this child would ever make the intellectual progress that the researchers desired to see for him.8
It is quite tragic how quickly scientists were to give up on the young boy’s intelligence and hope for his domestication. The leading researcher that remained, Itard, made five goals that he hoped to accomplish with the boy: they wanted 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 clearly.9 As Itard continued working with the boy, progress began to occur. He started eating food with spoons and would no longer grab food out of the boiling pot with his bare hands.9After seeing these results, Itard moved into the next phase of his research. The “wild boy” finally received his name, Victor. It was in this phase of research that Victor finally said his first words, “Oh Dieu!”(Oh my God), which is an exclamation of happiness.11 Although he could only communicate with random noises, Victor was finally expressing himself. The goals Itard had set for Victor were starting to be met. Itard’s progress had led him and his research team to believe that Victor did not actually suffer from idiocy, but rather, he was merely developing. They compared him to a toddler learning to talk.12
The progress was not fast enough for the people watching over Itard’s research. After Victor failed his language course, his language therapist was extremely disappointed because his results were much lower than they had been from his previous results. After that failure, Itard had to take responsibility for it and find a new way to push Victor to work harder and push his limits. Victor began to receive shock treatments, which started to increase his results tremendously. These shock therapy sessions were very common in the nineteenth century, but their results could be deadly due to the electric current and massive amounts of drugs that were given to patients when they received this inhumane treatment. Nonetheless, Victor could now identify shapes and colors and was also able to match objects that looked alike.13 Not all the effects of the shock therapy were positive. Victor began to act out and had a hard time controlling his anger. As time passed, these outbursts of rage kept occurring. Eventually, Victor started to fall into convulsions because of his rage. Itard then began to fear that in trying to help this young boy become domesticated, he was instead giving him an incurable disease (epilepsy).14
Shortly after this, Victor’s progress slowed down as his rage continued to worsen. In one instance, Itard decided to conduct a test in order to see if Victor truly understood what the words meant. Itard moved him to a different room with similar objects. He showed Victor a card that said “book” and Victor went to the door and refused to retrieve any of the books that were already in the room. This was because he wanted the book he had been retrieving during his testing in the other room. The Wild Boy had learned, but not what Itard thought. He became able to catch patterns and became comfortable with these patterns. So when he was moved from his environment for further testing, he wasn’t familiar with his surroundings, and became enraged and unwilling to work or cooperate with anyone. These events led Itard to conclude his research, because he felt that there was nothing else to research. As Victor continued the onsets of puberty, Itard felt that he would have to wait for years before Victor could resume his progress.18
In Itard’s concluding report where he reflected on the research, he wrote three negative conclusions: “1. because he cannot hear the speech of the other and learn to speak himself, Victor’s education will always be incomplete. 2. His intellectual progress will never match that of children usually brought up in society. 3. His emotional development is locked by the profound impossibility of channeling his awakening sexuality toward any satisfactory goals.”19
After Itard had concluded his experiment, many continued to debates as to whether his tests were a waste of time. There were people who tried to claim that the experiment was successful. Many scientists asserted that the reason that Victor struggled so much to become “domesticated” was that he was innately incapable of becoming civilized. Others argued that Victor’s environment was to blame for his lack of progress. In this period, people were thought to be who they inevitably were either because of their innate nature or because of the environment in which they were nurtured: the nature-nurture debate. Those of the nature side of the debate believed that criminals were people who were defective innately, and therefore would inevitably be imprisoned. This is how many saw Victor as well, saying that he was initially a savage and would always be one regardless of educational rehabilitation. But Itard’s team argued that humans aren’t naturally disposed to be one way or another, and that one’s nurturing and educational experiences offer much hope to someone like Victor.20 Itard saw Victor as a boy with potential when no one else saw any worth in this so-called “savage.” But Itard pushed social sciences and science to new limits providing new lenses for people studying education, autism, idiocy, and simply how people development. Itard accomplished the improvement of Victor’s sight and touch and enlarged his perspective on the world. Victor also learned how to communicate with others and he learned some written signs. Finally, this extraordinary “Wild Boy” learned how to build friendship and “love others.”21The world naturally hesitates to accept anything new and out of the ordinary, but sometimes it is extraordinary individuals like Victor and Itard that push the limits of the world around them. These two proved many people wrong; they said Victor was incapable of learning anything because he was an idiot and nature made him like that, so he was just stuck like that. But, Itard refused to believe that, and he helped push Social Sciences to new heights.
Sadly, Victor lived the rest of his life like a zoo animal. They never gave this young boy the chance to develop himself fully. The state kept him alive, and no one noticed him when he was gone. He died in early 1828. There are no records of his death, and it is uncertain as to how he died. It is quite tragic that this child did so much for the social sciences, but he was treated as nothing more than a science experiment. In that case, I believe that is why he is known as “The Forbidden Experiment.”22
- Roger Shattuck, The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron (Great Britain: Secker and Warburg, 1980), 1, 4, 8, 9, 13. ↵
- Nancy Yousef, “Savage or Solitary: The Wild Child and Rousseau’s Man of Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 2 (2001): 245, 249. ↵
- Roger Shattuck, The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron (Great Britain: Secker and Warburg, 1980), 15, 18, 20. ↵
- Nancy Yousef, “Savage or Solitary: The Wild Child and Rousseau’s Man of Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 2 (2001): 245, 250. ↵
- Gregory Claeys, The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge Press, 2010), 63-64, 66. ↵
- Nicole Simon, “Kaspar Hauser’s recovery and autopsy: A perspective on neurological and sociological requirements for language development,” Journal of Autism and Childhood Schizophrenia 2, no. 2 (1978). 250, 252, 259. ↵
- Murray K. Simpson, “From Savage to Citizen: Education, Colonialism, and Idiocy,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 28, no. 5 (2007): 571. ↵
- Murray K. Simpson, “From Savage to Citizen: Education, Colonialism, and Idiocy,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 28, no. 5 (2007): 565. ↵
- Roger Shattuck, The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron (Great Britain: Secker and Warburg, 1980), 159. ↵
- Roger Shattuck, The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron (Great Britain: Secker and Warburg, 1980), 159. ↵
- Roger Shattuck, The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron (Great Britain: Secker and Warburg, 1980), 87. ↵
- Nicole Simon, “Kaspar Hauser’s recovery and autopsy: A perspective on neurological and sociological requirements for language development,” Journal of Autism and Childhood Schizophrenia 2, no. 2 (1978): 88, 90. ↵
- Roger Shattuck, The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron (Great Britain: Secker and Warburg, 1980), 90, 91. ↵
- Robert E. Drake, “The History of Community Mental Health Treatment and Rehabilitation for Persons with Severe Mental Illness,” Community mental health journal 39, no. 5 (2003): 427. ↵
- Robert E. Drake, “The History of Community Mental Health Treatment and Rehabilitation for Persons with Severe Mental Illness,” Community mental health journal 39, no. 5 (2003): 427, 433. ↵
- Encyclopedia Britannica, May 2016, s.v. “Shock Therapy,” by Darshana Das. ↵
- Murray K. Simpson, “From Savage to Citizen: Education, Colonialism, and Idiocy,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 28, no. 5(2007). 570, 574. ↵
- Roger Shattuck, The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron (Great Britain: Secker and Warburg, 1980), 198. ↵
- Roger Shattuck, The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron (Great Britain: Secker and Warburg, 1980), 197, 200, 201. ↵
- Encyclopedia Britannica, May 2016, s.v. “Feral Child,” by Michelle Jarman. ↵
- Roger Shattuck, The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron (Great Britain: Secker and Warburg, 1980), 201. ↵
- Murray K. Simpson, “From Savage to Citizen: Education, Colonialism, and Idiocy,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 28, no. 5 (2007): 572, 574. ↵
78 comments
Victoria Salazar
Wow, this article is both brilliant and devastating. I think Victor’s environment was definitely the reason for him being unable to develop fully. He was at an unfair disadvantage from all other people, which was that he probably had little to no human interaction in the first six to eight years of his life. Thank goodness they finally stopped shock therapy and all other inhumane treatments of mental health patients in most parts of the world. I definitely think that modern medicine would’ve had more progress with Victor and would’ve treated him less like a science experiment and more like a human being.
Malleigh Ebel
This seemed very tragic and traumatizing to Victor, or the Wild Boy, since they treated him like an experiment instead of a person, as well as subjected him to shock therapy to domesticate him. I think this shows that while hard, this 6-8 year old boy was able to learn how to somewhat communicate and read because of Itard. I thought it was interesting that in both this case and the case with Genie, their immediate thought to someone not being equipped with communicating with other humans as someone who’s mentally impaired, which in both cases was shown not to be the case. It seems from this article while communication is hard to learn when older, lack of communication does not mean lack of intelligence in most cases, although many may jump to that conclusion.
Nooraldeen Aldrees
Interesting story. I wonder at what age he was left in the forest, and if they could have run a DNA test on him to examine his ancestry. Probably they did not have that technology at that time. What caught my attention that victor had a shirt when the first saw him at age of eight years. The question is, where did he get that shirt from? If he were a baby left in the jungle, and they found him at early age, I would understand find him with clothes. But, at eight his size changed a lot from when he was a child. We can have many possibilities: he could have made it, he could have found it, he could have been left in the forest in late age -like 6 or 7-. Also, Maybe the child had a learning disability. The city that he was found in France was 6 hours drive away from Spain, so he could be not from France. Many questions can be asked about this unfortunate kid. Unfortunately, he was left to inhumane scientific experiments, and as the story indicate he died early. They did not mention a reason for death, but I would highly believe is due to treating him as an experiment not as a human.
Also, they mentioned that he escaped from the orphanage. I wonder where did they find him. Did he try to go back to the jungle? or they found him somewhere else. since her ran away, then he knew that he was not treated humanly , as the reader who read his story can sense that. If I were the scantiest, I would not catch him. Otherwise, I will observe him to collect more data about his behavior out of the experimental atmosphere. However, the scientists were too eager to put him back in the cage rather than having an objective analysis of who he was.
Nooraldeen Aldrees
Interesting story. I wonder at what age he was left in the forest, and if they could have run a DNA test on him to examine his ancestry. Probably they did not have that technology at that time. What caught my attention that victor had a shirt when the first saw him at age of eight years. The question is, where did he get that shirt from? If he were a baby left in the jungle, and they found him at early age, I would understand find him with clothes. But, at eight his size changed a lot from when he was a child. We can have many possibilities: he could have made it, he could have found it, he could have been left in the forest in late age -like 6 or 7-. Also, Maybe the child had a learning disability. The city that he was found in France was 6 hours drive away from Spain, so he could be not from France. Many questions can be asked about this unfortunate kid. Unfortunately, he was left to inhumane scientific experiments, and as the story indicate he died early. They did not mention a reason for death, but I would highly believe is due to treating him as an experiment not as a human.
Nooraldeen Aldrees
Also, they mentioned that he escaped from the orphanage. I wonder where did they find him. Did he try to go back to the jungle? or they found him somewhere else. since her ran away, then he knew that he was not treated humanly , as the reader who read his story can sense that. If I were the scantiest, I would not catch him. Otherwise, I will observe him to collect more data about his behavior out of the experimental atmosphere. However, the scientists were too eager to put him back in the cage rather than having an objective analysis of who he was.
Amelia Hew
It’s amazing on how a young boy was able to survive in the wilderness without receiving help, like what happened in The Jungle Book, Mowgli at least got help and guidance from the wolves and Bagheera. Despite the Jungle Book being a classic Disney Movie, it’ hard to imagine it in real life. It’s sad to know that Victor was given up by the doctors and abandoned by the society due to his abnormal behavior after living in the wilderness for so long.
Aaron Peters
What a surprising story, Im surprised he was able to survive so long on his own in the wilderness. The experiments done on Victor as well were quite horrible. It is interesting that Disney’s jungle book would take inspiration from what seems to be a tragedy, It’s a shame that the doctors seemingly gave up on him, despite making progress and even learning how to speak words.
Bruno Lezama
When I was a child, I used to see the Disney version of The Jungle Book a lot with my family. This movie was one of my favorites. This article changed the way that I see this movie. I can’t believe that all that I saw in the Disney movie happened in real life. It is sad to know how Vitor, the real-life Mowgli, had to deal with the social problems because he lived on the jungle. Great Article!
Analisa Cervantes
Before now I never knew there was a real life “Mowgli”. However I find it very sad how he was treated due to societal views at the time. No one saw him as a person and he was treated as an animal. I find it interesting however that despite his circumstances he was able to gain some knowledge although it did not improve his life.
Emily Velazquez
I loved the way this story was told. The first paragraph looped me in because it related the movie to real life and of course I have seen the movie “The Jungle Book”. I cannot think to imagine how the boy lived on his own for so long. It would have been so interesting if people would have tried to get him to talk and learn how to communicate with people so that the boy could have told his story.
John Cadena
An excellent example of an explanatory narrative. In fact, as I read through this piece, it came off to me as two individual narratives which perfectly accented one another rather than a traditional narrative/ digression layered story. From the beginning, the use of a well-recognized Disney story laid a solid foundation for what I should expect and left me wanting to read further in wonder as to what was next. What helped as well, was my ignorance regarding this story. For those like me, Thomas does a very good job of combining the narrative of storytelling with the informative elements needed to maintain the attention of his reader. Although it is easily understood, the one area which I wished was better formed were the visuals used in this story. Being so intrigued by this story, I would have loved to see more documented footage of this real-life Mowgli. Despite this, such a good job was done in capturing my attention that it has left me wanting to expand on this story and learn more.