Idiocy : and its treatment by the physiological method / by Edward Seguin.

  • Seguin, Edward, 1812-1880.
Date:
[1907]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Idiocy : and its treatment by the physiological method / by Edward Seguin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    2d. Juvenis Ursinus Lithuanus. 1661. (A young man found among bears in Lithuania.) 3d. Juvenis Ovinus Hibernus. Tulp. Obs. IV. (A young man found among wild sheep in Ireland.) 4th, Juvenis Bovinus Bambergensis. Camerar. (A young man found among herds of oxen near Bamberg.) 5th. Juvenis Hannoverianus. 1724. (A young man found in Hanover.) 6th. Lueri Pyrenaici. 1719. (Two boys found in the Pyrenees.) 7th. Puella Transisalana. 1717. (A girl found in the Dutch Province of Over-Yssel.) 8th. Puella Campanica. 1731. (A girl found in Cham- pagne and since named Mile. Leblanc.) 9th. Johannes Leodisensis. Boerhaave. (John of Liege.) loth. Puella Karpfensis. 1767. (The girl of Karpfen.) nth. Juvenis Averionensis. Anno Reipublicoe Gallicoe octavo. (The savage of the Aveyron, in the year eighth of the French Republic.) It would be curious, but unprofitable, to follow the scanty traces of method and education left in the legends concern- ing the ten first cases. Such was, says Itard, in those remote times the defective march of studies, the mania of explanation, the uncertainty of hypothesis, the exclusiveness of abstract thinking, that observation was set at naught, and these precious facts were lost for the natural history of man. But the rooted faith in which Itard himself was an adept, that if a true savage—meaning a savage, savage even to savage tribes—could be found, his education would evidence the natural springs of the human mind, obliterated in us by artificial culture; that faith, which lighted before the psy- chologist the same Ignis Fatuus that the philosopher's stone raised before the alchemist, gives a sure guarantee that none of the means those times could afford were spared to develop the faculties long dormant in these unfortunates, under the cover of animal instinct and habit. But we have to come to the eleventh case, that of the Savage of the Aveyron, to emerge from fiction into history; there we begin to feel that we are on scientific ground. The first part of his biography.