On the artificial manufacture of wild men

Honolulu Daily Bulletin, 3 Feb. 1893

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.

• MacGowan, D. J. (June 1893), "The Artificial Making of Wild Men in China", China Medical Missionary Journal (Shanghai) 7 (2): 79-81, http://imageserver.library.yale.edu/digcoll:227488/500.pdf  — first published in The Celestial Empire
• Gould, George M.; Pyle, Walter L. (1900), "The artificial manufacture of 'wild men' or 'wild boys' in the Chinese Empire", Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, p. 447-448, https://archive.org/details/anomaliescuriosi00gouluoft/page/448 

News Articles

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

• "MANUFACTURING WILD MEN. How the Gentle Art is Practised in China.", Daily Bulletin (Honolulu, Hawaii): 4, 1893-02-03 
• "MANUFACTURE OF WILD MEN. Children Are Kidnaped in China and Slowly Transformed into a Brutal Condition.", Hopkinsville Kentuckian (Hopkinsville, Ky.): 8, 1895-04-23, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86069395/1895-04-23/ed-1/seq-8/