Word: victors
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Whether genuinely baffled, simply supercautious or just plain ornery, U.S. primary voters continue to dangle the presidential nominations tantalizingly beyond the reach of all contenders. A victor's smile and glowing predictions seem only to ensure a comeuppance seven days later. As the primary trail nears an apparently inconclusive end, a clutch of uncommitted delegates to both Democratic and Republican Conventions has been dealt a hot-and potentially decisive-hand. They may well determine the 1976 nominees...
Itard's plan was to lead Victor into the world of ideas through the realm of his senses--to make him sensitive to the subtle stimuli of a controlled environment. After modifying Victor's sense of touch with daily baths and focusing his wandering gaze, Itard sought to teach him the connection between the look and feel of objects and their corresponding names. But even at this early stage Itard ran aground. Victor's senses responded only when food was involved: he turned to the sound of walnut being cracked but remained unflinching in the face of a deafening blast...
...given the abstruse and archaic state of medicine in France before the Revolution, Itard achieved a minor miracle in teaching Victor at all. The foremost doctors of the day were quick to declare Victor a congenital idiot and asked to banks him to the inhuman, rat-infested cubicles which served as the asylums of Paris. "He's not deaf and dumb because he was left in the forest, he was left in the forest because he was deaf and dumb," they said, and one rumor had Victor the illegitimate son of a provincial notaire who cast him into the woods...
Lane has scrutinized the original accounts of Victor's case (his text in parts merely strings together documentary material), and he rejects the idiocy theory. Instead, Lane suggests that Victor became functionally autistic because of his isolation, and he faults Itard--I think rightly--for not providing Victor with more human contact during his training. Victor might have crossed that divide between programmed and self-motivated behavior, Lane argues, if he had discovered through his own initiative society's response to his actions...
After half a decade of small advances and continual frustrations, Itard finally gave up on his work with Victor, who lived out his life, still animal-like, under the attentive eye of a Mme. Guerin, in Paris. Given the space Lane allots to "Itard's Legacy," he seems to feel that the young doctor's contribution to the science of education made his project a success. But Itard considered his work with Victor a total failure, preferring to be remembered for his invention of a sign language for the deaf. Bringing the wild child back into society had been...