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The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron
 
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The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron (Paperback)

by Roger Shattuck (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
RRP: £9.99
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Product details

  • Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Kodansha America, Inc; New edition edition (1 Feb 2000)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1568360487
  • ISBN-13: 978-1568360485
  • Product Dimensions: 21.5 x 14.2 x 1.9 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 189,274 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #60 in  Books > Biography > Political > Countries & Regions > France

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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

On a cold morning just a few days into the year 1800, the citizens of the southern French village of Saint-Sernin awoke to a strange vision: a hairy boy, naked, who appeared as if by some witchcraft from the nearby woods. Captured while digging up vegetables from a tanner's garden, the boy did not--could not--speak. Instead, he emitted a few weird cries, trying to hide himself from his puzzled captors.

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 home-grown 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 encyclopaedia 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.

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Customer Reviews

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5.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful, poignant account, 11 Jul 1999
By A Customer
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.
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1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars I am not the 'designer', but the author of a 'new preface', 29 Dec 1998
By A Customer
A reprint of this well-known and splendid book
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