Jean Marc Gaspard Itard

but the merit of having completed a genuine educational system for deficient children was due to Édouard Seguin, first a teacher and then a physician.

He took the experiences of Itard as his starting point, applying these methods, modifying and completing them during a period of ten years' experience with children taken from the insane asylums and placed in a little school in Rue Pigalle in Paris.

This method was described for the first time in a volume of more than 600 pages, published in Paris in 1846, with the title Traitement Moral, Hygiène and Éducation des Idiots.

Later, Segan emigrated to the United States of America, where he founded many institutions for deficients, and where, after another 20 years of experience, he published the second edition of his method, under a very different title, It Easy and Its Treatment by the Physiological Method.

I found, however, wherever I went, in London as well as in Paris, a desire for fresh counsel and for new experiences, since far too often Sagan's claim that with his methods the education of idiots was actually possible had proved only a delusion.

After this study of the methods in use throughout Europe, I concluded my experiments upon the deficients of Rome and taught them throughout two years.

I followed Sagan's book and also derived much help from the remarkable experiments of Itard.

Guided by the work of these two men, I had manufactured a great variety of didactic material.