On the artificial manufacture of wild men

China, c. 1890s
An account by Daniel J. MacGowan (1814-1893), an American missionary doctor, of the practice in China, who related that youths were kidnapped in order to transform them into wild men for exhibition, the process involving their isolation in the dark for an unspecified number of years, while their captors gradually grafted the skin of a dog or bear onto their flayed bodies, destroyed their vocal chords with charcoal, and forced them to walk on all fours, the trauma acting to reduce their cognitive function to a generally broken state.


 * &mdash; first published in The Celestial Empire

News Articles
Credited to the Chicago Inter-Ocean, where it was attributed to an unnamed (but well-known) English doctor.