Paul Pierre Broca

From Freepedia

Paul Pierre Broca (June 28, 1824 – July 9, 1880) was a French physician, anatomist and anthropologist.

Broca was born in Sainte-Foy-la-Grande. He was a prodigy as a child, holding baccalaureate degrees simultaneously in literature, mathematics and physics. He entered medical school in Paris when he was only 17 years old, and graduated at 20, when most of his contemporaries were just beginning as medical students.

Broca soon became a professor of surgical pathology at the University of Paris and a noted medical researcher in many areas. At the age of 24 he had recieved many awards, medals and important positions. His early scientific works dealt with the histology of cartilage and bone, but he also studied cancer pathology, the treatment of aneurysms, and infant mortality. As a superb neuroanatomist, he made important contributions to the understanding of the limbic system, or rhinencephalon.

Broca is most famous for his discovery of the speech center of the brain (now known as the Broca's area, the third circumvolution of the frontal lobe). He arrived at this discovery by studying the brains of aphasic patients (persons unable to talk), particularly the brain of his first patient in the Bicêtre Hospital, named "Tan," who Broca discovered in 1861 to have a neurosyphilitic lesion in one side of the brain, precisely in the area which controlled speech.

Broca was also a pioneer in the study of physical anthropology. He founded the Anthopological Society in 1859, the Revue d'Anthropologie in 1872, and the School of Anthropology in Paris in 1876. He advanced the science of cranial anthropometry by developing many new types of measuring instruments (craniometers) and numerical indices. The uses that racist ideologues and even reputable scientists made of Broca's measurements and conclusions have been analyzed by Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man (1981). Broca's work is also featured in Carl Sagan's Broca's Brain.

Another field in which Broca contributed significantly was the comparative anatomy of primates. He described for the first time trephined skulls from the Neolithic. He was very interested in the relation between anatomical features of the brain and mental capabilities, such as intelligence.

As a personality, Broca seemed to be a remarkable individual. His contemporaries described him as a "generous, compassionate and kind, with unbreakable fortitude and honesty, venerated by all. He never made an enemy and never lost a friend. He was noble and a Christian follower." Despite this characterization, Broca was denounced by authorities as a subversive, materialist, and corrupter of the youth after he founded a society of freethinkers in 1848 sympathetic to Charles Darwin's theories.

Broca was an indefatigable worker and wrote hundreds of books and papers; 53 of them were devoted to the brain. He was also concerned with health care for the poor, being an important figure in the Assistance Publique. Among his more successful students were Paul Topinard and Joseph Deniker.

Near the end of his life, Paul Broca was elected a lifetime member of the French Senate. He was also a member of the Académie Française and held honorary degrees from many other learned institutions, both in France and abroad. Broca died in Paris in 1880.