Peter the Wild Boy

Record summary

Peter was a feral or socially isolated boy discovered near Hamelin and brought to the British court, where he attracted attention from George I, Caroline of Ansbach, and physicians including John Arbuthnot. He did not acquire normal speech and lived for decades under supervision. The case matters because it shows how disability, language deprivation, and unfamiliar behavior could be framed as wild humanity before modern developmental understanding. His exact early history is uncertain, and later popular accounts exaggerated or romanticized his condition as evidence of a nonordinary human type.