Victor. The Wild Boy of Aveyron

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http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/Itard

Is this the earliest case of an autistic child that was documented? This was way before autism was even known.

Possibly? It says he was 4ft something, so I took that to mean he was a very young child at that point.... It may be that his parents, not knowing what was wrong or having the resources to find out (like parents do today) they may have turned him out. Or maybe they would have thought he was possessed because of the rocking etc? Anways, after they turned him out, he wasn't able to fend for himself on the streets because he lacked language, or wasn't able to communicate properly with people, or other homeless children (didn't know body language, or spoken nuances etc etc) and people would have treated him badly because 1)he was on the streets (think street urchin) and 2)because he was an "idiot". Being unable to steal something because he would have been clumsy and not able to be subtle about things, and unable to get a job for whatever reason, and people would have been mean to him or said harsh words, he turned to the woods in order to get sustenance etc.

As for him not learning to speak: Because people were mean to him and because he would have been very young when he went into the woods, he wouldn't have a good grasp on language to begin with and may have developed an aversion to it? But that seems a little far-fetched, so:
I think its easier to learn to speak when you're very young, and that is the theory behind teaching your children to speak several languages at a young age, that some parents are trying nowadays... There was a story on the news one time where this girl was abused/neglected. Her mother was mentally ret*d or something similar, and abused the girl. The girl first learned to speak by listening to the rats and squeaking like one. She was 12 or a little older when someone finally got her out of the home, and she never learned to speak.
(It was on the American Broadcasting Channel [ABC], like Dateline with jon straussel-sp- or something)


That would be my theory, anyway.

I don't see enough evidence of this boy even being autistic. His verbal and social difficulties seem a response to not being around humans at an early age. Do you have another link that discribes more autistic traits that would not be explained from his odd socialization by wolves?

Sounds autistic to me.

This is a rather better link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_of_Aveyron

I am struck by the surgeon's suggestion that Victor's scars were the result of abuse, and how most historians/psychologists who have studied the "wolf-boy" phenomenon now believe that it is unlikely that such children really were brought up by animals in the wild.

It sounds very possible that Victor had run away from, or lost himself, or been chased away by his own "family" after years of abuse/neglect because of autism spectrum functioning/mental "disability" of some kind, more likely than that he had survived on his own in the wild all his life.

In following up references to the history of childhood in Alice Miller's books especially "For your own good", I have read some awful tales of child abuse, virtually taken for granted, in the german/prussian countries in the 18th and 19th centuries, in which were treated as beasts of burden or as more of a nuisance than a noisy dog, penned up, ill fed, etc.

In fact the "wolf-boy" phenomenon sounds very like the sort of cover-story society invents for itself for its own worst behaviours.

Do you mean Genie?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_%28feral_child%29

If you're talking about Genie, she was actually afraid to make vocalizations when she was first found- they thought she might have been hit or something when she made noise.

She actually did learn to speak though. She had no problem learning vocabulary words and phrases, but she was never able to fully grasp English grammar. Speculation was that she had passed the "critical" period for learning language, and thus was only able to learn language to the extent that apes have been able to learn it- vocabulary without any true syntax.

I think the case is important because it is perhaps the first description of autistic behavior. That is why the story is often included in books about autism (at least the ones I've read).

It is impossible to say whether he truly was autistic because nothing is known about his history prior to living alone as a "wild boy". No one knows how old he was when he was abandoned by his family, or how he behaved early on in his life. Maybe they threw him out because he was autistic, or maybe he acted like an autistic person because he was deprived of human contact for so long.

There have been more recent cases of "wild children" who were separated from their families for various reasons and lived alone in a wilderness setting until they were found and taken back into society. As these cases are studied in greater depth, more light could be shed on the case of Victor.

it's been shown that if language isn't learned early enough... that it won't really develop past was was observed in victor. the mind is very plastic (flexible)... but only so far.

that is possible, language and social skills are learned concepts. If he was cast away by his parents at age 4 then even if he was NT he would not have had time to learn them.