First annual report of the trustees and superintendent of the Ohio Asylum for the Education of Idiotic and Imbecile Youth, to the fifty-third general assembly for the year 1857.

  • Ohio State Asylum for the Education of Idiotic and Imbecile Youth
Date:
1858
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: First annual report of the trustees and superintendent of the Ohio Asylum for the Education of Idiotic and Imbecile Youth, to the fifty-third general assembly for the year 1857. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    APPENDIX A. ORIGIN OF THE TREATMENT AND TRAINING OF IDIOTS. BY EDWARD SEGUIN. None but God can do anything of himself alone. Hence the question of priority in human discovery is always contested. If the truthful history of any invention i were written, we should find concerned in it the thinker, who dreams, without reach- I ing the means of putting his imaginings in practice; the mathematician, who esti- t mates justly the forces at command, in their relation to each other, but who forgets I to proportion them to the resistance to be encountered ; and so on, through the ij thousand intermediates between the dream and the perfect idea, till one comes who combines the result of the labors of all his predecessors, and gives to the invention new life, and wi(h it his name. But, in good faith, this man is but the expression—honorable and often honored—- 5 of human fraternity. And it is only from this point of view that the full benefit of lithe discovery is seen : being the common property of mankind, it gives us wider land deeper feelings of mutual dependence or solidarity. A short notice of the ori- [i gin of the treatment and training of the unfortunate idiots will be an illustration of !'|this law of mutual dependence. fl In the year 1801, the citizen M. Bonnaterre discovered, in the forest of Aveyron, France, a wild boy. This naked boy was marked with numerous scars ; he was jj|nimble as a deer, subsisting on roots and nuts, which he cracked like a monkey, jdlaughiog at the falling snow, and rolling himself with delight in this white blanket. II He seemed to be about 17 years of age. Bonnaterre permitted this wild boy to Idescape, but afterwards retook him, and sent him, at his own expense, to the abb6 riiSicard, director of the Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, at Paris. H Sicard had just succeeded the illustrious abbe L’Ep^e, and Bonnaterre thought ichim to be the most suitable man to perform the miracle of which he dreamed—the neducation of this creature, the most inferior that had ever been seen under the form t.of humanity, but he was mistaken. Sicard exhibited, for some days, to the learned band curious, the being, who was constantly throwing away his clothes and endeavor- I png to escape, even by the windows, and then left him to wander, neglected, under i dhe immense roofs of the school for deaf mutes. iH But the wild boy of Aveyron had been seen by all Paris. If the crowd of visitors .:had found him a subject of disgust, he excited in the mind of the thinkers add phi- ]|ilosophers a livelier interest. Some of those who had held conversation with Frank- ri [in on the liberty of the world were still living, and by them the subject was brought uhefore the Academy of Sciences, where it produced interesting and fruitful dis¬ cussions. Two men were particularly conspicuous for their interest in the wild boy of Aveyron, viz,, Pinel, pbysician-in-cbief tor the insane, author of the Nosographie iPhilosopbigue, who declared the child idiotic—the sequel proved him correct; and d |[tard, phy^ician-in-chief of the deaf and dumb, who asserted that the subject was !;H; imply entirely untaught. Itard did m re ; he named him Victor, doubtless as a Ojilgn of the victory which education should achieve in him over brute nature, Bu id 9. .Tn JU TM ACV