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

roasting potatoes, which he popped straight into his mouth before they had cooled. For a long time, this was the only food he would eat.
    To the Enlightenment thinkers of the day, Victor’s mysterious arrival was viewed as an opportunity to explore the operative properties of human language. There were some who anticipated that, once he was exposed to spoken French, Victor would quickly develop a full command of the language. Some hoped this could happen within months and that it would prove the key to his full blossoming as a participant in civilization—that he would stop, for example, removing his new clothes and trying to run back into nature, or stop giving in to the impulse to defecate and urinate whenever and wherever it struck him. But when early attempts at instruction proved disappointing, interest in Victor faded. A panel of experts found him to be an “idiot,” not worthy of an education. He was shut away in an orphanage, where the other children bullied him.
    Itard then arranged for Victor to be cared for by a couple whose own children were grown, while he himself patiently worked with him daily as his personal teacher. With Itard instructing him, Victor made measurable strides. He became toilet-trained. He learned to wash and dress himself, to sit for meals, and even to set the table for himself. Itard taught him these complex procedures by breaking them down into small steps that could be practiced one at a time, over and over again.
    Teaching Victor to speak, however, was a frustrating exercise. Itard wrote of his excitement when, one day, Victor began repeating the phrase “Mon Dieu.” It soon became clear, however, that he was only parroting something he had heard someone else say. He did learn to manipulate a set of steel alphabet letters to spell out a few words, but his comprehension of their meaning and use was minimal. He could communicate, and often did, by pantomiming—evidence that he had something to say. These gestures always related to his immediate desires—to eat, to go outside, to play the game where he was pushed about in a wheelbarrow. But in trying to teach him to say words aloud—even just to name things—Itard got nowhere.
    A key problem was Victor’s unusually selective hearing. He shutout certain sounds as though he were completely deaf to them. When Itard, as an experiment, came up behind him and fired a pistol twice into the air, Victor did not even flinch. The human voice was another sound that registered with Victor only feebly. But let someone crack a nut in the next room, and his head would jerk around in that direction.
    Itard, who regarded language as the essential test of Victor’s intelligence, finally considered himself defeated. After five years, he stopped all teaching.“Seeing that my efforts were leading nowhere,” he said, “I gave up my efforts to teach Victor to speak, and I abandoned him to a state of incurable muteness.” Itard would continue to work with mentally challenged people, making contributions to the theory and methodology that became the bedrock of special education as it developed for the next 150 years.
    Victor spent his last years comfortably, treated with kindness. The state paid for his upkeep under the care of the married couple, who treated him almost as a son. He died in 1828 around the age of forty, far from the wilderness, having never spoken a full sentence, and always giving the appearance, like little Donald Triplett a century later, of being happiest when left alone.
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    O N F EBRUARY 26, 1848, a leather-bound report was delivered to the Massachusetts statehouse by one of the most compassionate activists the state had ever seen. Samuel Gridley Howe was the founder of the New England Asylum for the Blind, the institution that almost single-handedly changed the minds of Americans about the ability of blind people to benefit from an education. In both Europe and America, blindness was treated like deafness, lameness, epilepsy, or