title: The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment
author:  Julia V. Douthwaite 
description: <DIV>This study looks at the lives of the most famous "wild children" of eighteenth-century Europe, showing how they open a window onto European ideas about the potential and perfectibility of mankind. Julia V. Douthwaite recounts reports of feral children such as the wild girl of Champagne (captured in 1731 and baptized as Marie-Ang&eacute;lique Leblanc), offering a fascinating glimpse into beliefs about the difference between man and beast and the means once used to civilize the uncivilized. <BR><BR>A variety of educational experiments failed to tame these feral children by the standards of the day. After telling their stories, Douthwaite turns to literature that reflects on similar experiments to perfect human subjects. Her examples range from utopian schemes for progressive childrearing to philosophical tales of animated statues, from revolutionary theories of regenerated men to Gothic tales of scientists run amok. Encompassing thinkers such as Rousseau, Sade, Defoe, and Mary Shelley, Douthwaite shows how the Enlightenment conceived of mankind as an infinitely malleable entity, first with optimism, then with apprehension. Exposing the darker side of eighteenth-century thought, she demonstrates how advances in science gave rise to troubling ethical concerns, as parents, scientists, and politicians tried to perfect mankind with disastrous results.</DIV>
zlib_text: 6/21/2019
  Untitled document - Google Docs
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  TOC F || BONANZA 
   
   
   
  
  THE UNIVERSAL TRUTH
    2
  FELL ACEO IBE9UZ
    28
  WINK ENZO THORNY CRO
    48
  SMIRKISH SCARE MAUI HO
    58
  THE FORCE AND THE FOOT
    80
  MECHACHI AFIKOMEN
    115
  EXCEPTUSQUE SARALESARAI SERINA
    152
  THURTLE AND MEADO
    190
  INDIANA HAZE AND PINELT3
    202
  HO MEISSA LATKAS N
    226
  
  6/21/2019
  CEMENTARY REPRINT -
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  I am accep�ng charitable dona�ons,.
  No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world
  was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as
  mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they
  were scru�nised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope
  might scru�nise the transient creatures that swarm and mul�ply in a drop of water.
  With inﬁnite complacency men went to and fro over thi