‘Study of several involuntary functions of the apparatus of movement, gripping, and voice’ by Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard (1825)

Abstract

Abstract Itard's 1825 paper, written while he was Chief Physician at the National Institute for Deaf-Mutes in Paris, demonstrates his empiricist approach to medicine. That is, Itard founded his medical practice on sense and experience rather than on surgery and medication. If all knowledge came through the senses, Itard reasoned, those lacking knowledge or social abilities could be improved by appropriate sensory stimulation. This concern with senses and society, along with his different approaches to men and women, his references to contemporary cures and his comparisons between humans and animals, document early nineteenth-century medical and psychological attitudes and treatments. Itard's paper also contains what was later recognized as the first clinical observation of Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome (TS).