The Forbidden Experiment

By: Billah Muhammad

 Throughout all of human history the support and care given from a caregiver to an infant

during the first years of life has been one of the most integral bonds to mold humans into

properly disposed individuals for their future lives as essential and properly functioning members

of their societies. In recent years, psychologists like Bowlby, Ainsworth, and Harlow have

recognized that the proper nurturing and raising of an infant requires that there be an affectionate

attachment created and cultivated between the infant and its caregiver, who is usually the mother.

In this essay I‟d like to concentrate on and compare the maternal separation and isolation

experiments done by Harry Harlow on rhesus and macaque monkeys to similar isolation

experiments that were carried out on human infants by the orders of Pharaoh Psamtik I of Egypt

(664-610 BC), Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1194-1250 AD) and Mughal Emperor Akbar

the Great (1542-1605). Though the distasteful experiments performed on infants by these

powerful potentates were carried out to try to observe the origin of human language by isolating

infants from all human contact and language, the methods used for the experiments were quite

similar to those conducted by Harlow much later on rhesus monkeys, his findings being

published in the early 1960s.

During the 5th Century BC, when Herodotus was in Egypt, he heard a story from

Memphis priests about an experiment done by the Pharaoh Psammetichus, who is now referred

to as Psamtik I:

Psammetichus, finding that mere inquiry failed to reveal what was the original

race of mankind, devised an ingenious method of determining the matter. He took

at random, from an ordinary family, two newly born infants and gave them to a

shepherd to be brought up amongst his flocks, under strict orders that no one
 should utter a word in their presence. They were to be kept by themselves in a

lonely cottage, and the shepherd was to bring in goats from time to time, to see

that the babies had enough milk to drink, and to look after them in any way that

was necessary. All these arrangements were made by Psammetichus because he

wished to find out what word the children would first utter, once they had grown

out of their meaningless baby-talk. The plan succeeded; two years later the

shepherd, who during that time had done everything he had been told to do,

happened one day to open the door of the cottage and go in, when both children

running up to him with arms outstretched, pronounced the word „becos‟. (De

Selincourt 86)

From this experiment, the Pharaoh determined that the Phrygians (an ancient Anatolian people

who lived in what is now Turkey) were a more ancient race than the Egyptians because the word

„becos‟ was their language‟s word for „bread‟. It can be assumed that the children did not come

up with the word out of thin air, but rather that someone, presumably the shepherd, accidentally

used the word „becos‟ once or twice when feeding them. From the scanty excerpt by Herodotus,

we are not now able to determine if the children were in any way psychologically scarred from

this experiment during their later lives, but based on modern psychological studies we can

determine that they probably were. This experiment also shows that even more than 600 years

before the birth of Jesus Christ, there were people carrying out experiments having to do with the

isolation of children. On his own experiments, Harlow wrote that “total social isolation of

macaque monkeys for at least the first 6 months of life consistently produces severe deficits in
virtually every aspect of social behavior.” (Harlow 1534-1538). I‟d expect similar effects on

human infants in Egypt in the 7th century BC.

The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II carried out a similar experiment 1800 years later

during the early 1200s:

He made linguistic experiments on the vile bodies of hapless infants, “bidding

foster-mothers and nurses to suckle and bathe and wash the children, but in no

way to prattle or speak with them; for he would have learnt whether they would

speak the Hebrew language (which had been the first), or Greek, Latin, or Arabic,

or perchance the tongue of their parents of whom they had been born. But he

labored in vain, for the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and

gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments.” (Coulton 242)

This experiment shows quite clearly that children raised in isolation without any nurturing

instincts from their mothers can suffer terrible consequences in their fragile state. According to

most interpretations of this text, which is taken from the “Chronicle of the Friar Adam of

Salimbene”, the children died, as they were not shown the proper loving attentions from their

caregivers, though they were given proper nourishment and hygiene to keep them healthy. I

would imagine that when Harlow began his experiment on his rhesus and macaque monkeys, he

would have probably been aware of the results of this experiment carried out by Emperor

Frederick II more than 700 years before.

The evidence that we have of Akbar the Great‟s isolation experiments in the late 1500s

gives much more detail on the progress of children who were raised away from human society.
The children were taking from their parents when they were still unable to talk, and then brought

up for the first 12 years of their life in a fortified castle that no one was able to enter or leave, on

pain of death. Their caregivers were deaf and mute so that they could not pass on any language

to the children that they were raising, and the contact with the children was kept to a minimum.

This account comes from a translation of the Persian “Book of Akbar”, written by Abu Fazl:

When these children appeared before the emperor, to the surprise of every one,

they were found incapable of expressing themselves in any language, or even of

uttering any articulate sounds. They used only certain gestures to express their

thoughts, and these were all the means which they possessed of conveying their

ideas, or a sense of their wants. They were, indeed, so extremely shy, and, at the

same time, of an aspect and manners so uncouth and uncultivated, that it required

great labour and perseverance to bring them under any discipline, and to enable

them to acquire the proper use of their tongues, of which they had previously

almost entirely denied themselves the exercise. (Catrou 117)

This excerpt shows the children exhibiting the same sorts of behaviors as the monkeys in

Harlow‟s experiments did when he tried to reintegrate them with monkeys who had been raised

in the normal way; the social awkwardness and lack of normal social skills, and also the

difficulty required to train them back to a normal state of human society. It does seem that the

text implies that the children were after much difficult training and effort able to achieve a

somewhat normal existence though being raised in such a way for the first 12 years of life is sure

to cause many deep seated and unresolved issues in an adult.

 Modern researchers have shown that when a parent touches their children, it activates

necessary neurotransmitters and other chemicals in their brain that are required for normalcy in

health and social interactions when they are older. I imagine that all of these children subjected

to these depraved experiments were prone to the same problems that are displayed by modern

children raised without proper nurturing and touch from their mothers. I think that these excerpts

have shown the result of a child raised without the proper nurturing instinct, of which human

language is in my opinion a major part, but it still must be asked, what is the nature of a child

raised without any socializing or nurturing aspects whatsoever?

In the winter of 1800, a wild, hungry and feral child wandered out of the forest in a

village of southern France called Saint-Sernin. He was captured after trying to steal vegetables

from a garden and was taken in by the people of the village who were bewildered by his wild

appearance and manners. He was wearing only the remains of a tattered shirt and nothing else.

He could not speak and did not seem to know the slightest thing of living with other human

beings. The boy was totally “unhousebroken.” He relieved himself wherever and whenever he

felt like it, squatting to urinate, defecating while standing. (Shattuck 7) This child was taken to

an orphanage and given the name “Joseph” and later “Victor”, and he spent the rest of his life

being studied by the intelligentsia of the early 19th century Republic of France. From what could

be found out about the child, it seemed that someone had taken him out to the forest and left him

there, and that he had lived alone and naked in the wild for many years, presumably from before

the time that a normal child learns to speak, because he was not able to vocalize even one word

for a very long time. He was able to survive quite well when he was in the wild, and his body

had adapted enough that he was able to bear the French winter naked perfectly well. He survived

on tubers and acorns. The child underwent training to become socialized from a Dr. Jean Marc
Gaspard Itard who was not very successful because the child never learned to read and write, and

only made rudimentary progress in showing normal human emotions and behaviors. He died in

1828. It can‟t be said if Victor had preexisting conditions like autism or dyslexia that hindered

his ability to learn language and emotions, or if the problem was simply how he spent the first 12

or so years of his life, but it can be seen that he displayed human nature as it is without the

civilizing veil that most of us are lucky enough to receive from the culture around us, and from

interrelations with other human beings as we grow.

It is hard to watch the videos of Harlow‟s monkey experiments without empathizing with

the test subjects, who though they do not have human emotions seem to suffer greatly when

raised without any sort of nurturing instinct. When you view the accounts of such experiments

that have been done on human children, they are all the more appalling. The author, Roger

Shattuck defines the sorts of investigations of children mentioned in this essay as “The

Forbidden Experiment”, in his own words:

What I call the forbidden experiment is one that would reveal to us what “human

nature” really is beneath the overlays of society and culture. Or at least an

experiment that could tell us if there is any such thing as human nature apart from

culture and individual heredity… Theoretically, it has always been possible to

perform the forbidden experiment. One needs only to separate an infant very early

from its mother and let it develop in nature, with no human contact, no education,

no help. Many philosophers have discussed such a project of artificially producing

a totally untutored human being. Usually they are concerned to know whether the

creature will have the power of speech. (Shattuck 41-44)

Hopefully in our future, humanity can always keep such perverted experiments in the forbidden

zone, but as I have shown in this essay there has been an interest in such experiments on infants

for over 2000 years, and I don‟t think it can be expected that the curiosity for such things will

just fade away, even with the array of new psychological techniques that we now have to

measure the same things, but only by being aware of the desecrations of our past can we avert

such similar practices in the future.

Bibliography:

Catrou, Francois. History of the Mogul Dynasty in India from its foundation by Tamerlane in the
year 1399 to the accession of Aurengzebe, in the year 1657 . London: J.M. Richardson, 1826.

Coulton, George Gordon. From St. Francis to Dante: A translation of all that is of primary
interest in the chronicle of the Franciscan Salimbene; (1221-1288). London: Barnicott &
Pearce, 1906.

De Selincourt, Aubrey. Herodotus: The Histories. London: Penguin Books, 1996.

Harlow, Harry F. and Stephen J. Suomi, "Social Recovery by Isolation-Reared Monkeys".

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 68.7 (July
1st, 1971): 1534-1538.

Shattuck, Roger. The Forbidden Experiment: The story of the wild boy of Aveyron. New York:
Farrar Straus Giroux, 1980.