In a Different Key: The Story of Autism by John Donvan, Caren Zucker Page A

protector in the world, the one person who had been keeping him out of trouble for his entire life. A wife could fill this role.
    The wedding that took place in 1746 immediately put younger brother John’s financial plans at risk. If Hugh and his new wife produced sons in wedlock, those boys would become the rightful heirs to Hugh’s portion of the estate, ending any claim on it by John or John’s sons. In 1747, John initiated proceedings to have the marriage annulled, on the grounds that his brother was not mentally competent enough to have entered into it in the first place.
    Against this background, a hearing was called to look into Hugh’s mental competence. It helped Houston and Frith in the 1990s that the court in the 1700s was gathering the same kinds of facts about Hugh that a psychologist interested in diagnosing autism would look for today. Everything contributed by the twenty-nine witnesses—clergymen, neighbors, craftsmen, laborers, and others who had contact with Hugh—pointed to his atypical behaviors.
    It all fell into place: Hugh’s various obsessions, his attachment to objects, his lack of connection to people, his indifference to social norms. There is striking evidence that Hugh exhibited echolalia, a frequently seen autistic trait in which a person only echoes what he has heard said by others.
    Having considered the evidence, the Scottish court ruled that Hugh Blair was a “natural fool,” incapable of entering into a contract, including a marriage contract. John Blair had won. The marriage was annulled. The prospect of a helpless, aging Hugh Blair, alone in the world once his mother passed on, must now have seemed a near certainty.
    Yet the record shows that was not what happened. Hugh’s mother must have chosen wisely, because the woman who was married to her son for a year did not leave his side once the court declared them, once again, unmarried. Hugh and his former wife remained a couple, not only living together outside the law but raising two sons as well. Hugh lived into his sixties in a family setting, where the neighbors knew who he was, and where he could collect twigs, wash out his wigs, and drop in on funerals for as long as he wished to.
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    F IFTY-THREE YEARS AFTER a court found Hugh Blair a “natural fool,” on the other side of the English Channel, a nearly naked boy walked out of the forest and immediately became the most famous child in France.The so-called Wild Boy of Aveyron, whose story was popularized in the Parisian press of 1800, became an object of fascination not just to newspaper readers but also to eminent scientists and philosophers of the day. The whole country puzzled over who he was and what state of the human condition he represented. A century and a half later, Leo Kanner’s description of Donald offered new insight to historians and psychologists still pondering this question: France’s Wild Boy had almost certainly been a person with autism.
    He was, at best guess, a twelve-year-old, with no family, no home, no history, and no name. When he opened his mouth, all that came out was a sort of low, guttural moan or an occasional high squeal. He was small—four feet one inch tall—and bone thin. He was covered with scars, and his gait was affected by one knee that turned in hard on the other. The newspapers of the time said he had spent years in the forest, cut off from human society, naked but covered in fur, like a bear, from head to toe.
    Except for the part about the fur, it was all true. He had been briefly captured by hunters around 1797 but soon escaped again. In 1800, he left the woods willingly and was taken in by a young doctor named Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, who gave him the name Victor. He amazed onlookers with his ability to run and climb and with his tolerance for cold and heat. Initially unwilling to wear regular clothes, he was seen rolling naked in snowdrifts. He was also known to plunge his fingersinto a bed of red-hot coals to pluck out