It was that attitude that helped society realize they needed to support and assist people with special needs and to stop viewing them as demons and outcast. In the book Mental Retardation it states that the first part of the 19th century was a time of enthusiasm for working with people who had various disabilities, an enthusiasm displayed by a number of people in society. Those people in society were more willing to help the less fortunate people with solid intervention. In the book entitled Mental Deficiency The Changing Outlook by Alan Clarke and Joseph Berg, it states that the origin of special education occurred in Europe in the early 1800's. It has been stated in Mental Retardation that special education was dramatically influenced by a man named Jean-Marc Itard (1774-1838). Itard was a medical doctor who was concerned with diseases of the ear and the needs of the deaf. In 1799 Itard became interested in a feral child and moved to and area in Aveyron France. During that same year Itard had an effect on many, it was because of him that another man by the name of Seguin wrote a book entitled Idiocy and Its Treatment by Physiological Methods, which became a major reference work for educating people with retardation in the latter part of the 19th century. During the late 19th century asylums, state hospitals and sanitariums were being recognized as the place for the mentally retarded. According to the website Historic Asylums some of the asylums of the 19th century represent a darker period in mental health care, with involuntary incarceration, barbaric and ineffective treatments, and abuse of patients. However, there is also a legacy of progressive institutional treatment left by Dorothea Dix, Thomas Story Kirkbride, John Galt, and others represented by these buildings and sites: treatments and philosophies which seem rather outdated today, but at the time were a great improvement in the treatment of the mentally ill.