Jean Marc Gaspard Itard

Jean Marc Gaspard Itard (1774 to 1838) was a French medical doctor born in Provence, best remembered for his work with Victor of Aveyron, the boy found living wild in the woods, and as an educator of the deaf. He had no university education and began as a bank clerk in Marseilles before the French Revolution pushed him into army service, where he presented himself as a physician and rose to deputy surgeon at the Val-de-Grace military hospital in Paris. He studied under Philippe Pinel, and in 1799 became physician at the national institution for the deaf and mute. In 1821 he published a major work on otology based on more than 170 detailed cases and is credited with an Eustachian catheter that bears his name. In 1825 he described the first case of what became known as Tourette syndrome. The record also notes that his experiments on deaf students, which included electrical shocks and leech therapy, were useless attempts to restore hearing. He directed Edouard Seguin in the education of a child with intellectual disabilities, a line of work later taken up by Maria Montessori.