Jean Marc Gaspard Itard

Born in 1775, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard became a French doctor whose name is especially associated with work on hearing and speech. He is often described as an early specialist in the education of deaf students, and he wrote influential studies on the development of language and the training of the senses.

He is best known to many readers for working with Victor of Aveyron, a boy found living in the wild in France at the end of the eighteenth century. Itard's attempts to teach Victor language and social behavior became one of the most discussed educational experiments of the era, raising lasting questions about human development, learning, and what environment can do for a child.

Itard died in 1838, but his reputation has lasted because his work sits at the meeting point of medicine, psychology, and education. He is still remembered as an important early figure in the history of deaf education and in the broader story of how teachers and physicians began to study child development in a more systematic way.