Jean Marc Gaspard Itard

Jean Marc Gaspard Itard (1774 to 1838) was a French physician born in Oraison in Provence, perhaps best known for his work with Victor of Aveyron and regarded as an educator of the deaf. After army service and medical training under Philippe Pinel, he became a physician at the National Institution for Deaf-Mutes in Paris in 1799 and later its head physician. He tried his educational theories on the celebrated case of Victor of Aveyron, the boy found in the woods near Aveyron, though he was disappointed with the progress he made; the case was dramatised in the 1970 film The Wild Child. In 1837 he directed Edouard Seguin in educating a child with intellectual disabilities, and Seguin went on to develop the first systematic method for educating such children, an approach Maria Montessori later studied and applied in Rome in 1900 and 1901. Itard also published a major work on otology in 1821, and his early experiments on deaf students, aimed at restoring hearing, are described by the source as torturous.