81 Facts About Paul Broca

Pierre Paul Broca was a French physician, anatomist and anthropologist.

Paul Broca is best known for his research on Broca's area, a region of the frontal lobe that is named after him.

Paul Broca's work revealed that the brains of patients with aphasia contained lesions in a particular part of the cortex, in the left frontal region.

Paul Broca was engaged in comparative anatomy of primates and humans and proposed that Negroes were an intermediate form between apes and Europeans.

Paul Broca saw each racial group as its own species and believed racial mixing eventually led to sterility.

Paul Broca was born on 28 June 1824 in Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, Bordeaux, France, the son of Jean Pierre "Benjamin" Broca, a medical practitioner and former surgeon in Napoleon's service, and Annette Thomas, a well-educated daughter of a Calvinist, Reformed Protestant, preacher.

Huguenot Paul Broca received basic education in the school in his hometown, earning a bachelor's degree at the age of 16.

Paul Broca entered medical school in Paris when he was 17, and graduated at 20, when most of his contemporaries were just beginning as medical students.

In 1848, Paul Broca became the Prosector, performing dissections for lectures of anatomy, at the University of Paris Medical School.

In 1853, Paul Broca became professor agrege, and was appointed surgeon of the hospital.

Paul Broca was elected to the chair of external pathology at the Faculty of Medicine in 1867, and one year later professor of clinical surgery.

Paul Broca worked for the Hopital St Antoine, the Pitie, the Hotel des Clinques, and the Hopital Necker.

Paul Broca became its secretary and then vice president by 1851.

Paul Broca joined and in 1865 became the president of the Societe de Chirurgie.

In parallel with his medical career, in 1848, Paul Broca founded a society of free-thinkers, sympathetic to Charles Darwin's theories.

Paul Broca once remarked, "I would rather be a transformed ape than a degenerate son of Adam".

In 1857, feeling pressured by others, and especially his mother, Paul Broca married Adele Augustine Lugol.

One year later, Paul Broca's mother died and his father, Benjamin, came to Paris to live with the family until his death in 1877.

In 1858, Paul Broca was elected as member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

In 1872, Paul Broca was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society.

Paul Broca was a member of the Academie francaise and held honorary degrees from many learned institutions, both in France and abroad.

Paul Broca died of a brain hemorrhage on 9 July 1880, at the age of 56.

Paul Broca demonstrated that rickets, a disorder that results in weak or soft bones in children, was caused by an interference with ossification due to disruption of nutrition.

Paul Broca made regular presentations on the clubfoot disorder, a birth defect where infants feet where rotated inwards at birth.

At the time Paul Broca saw degeneration of muscle tissue as an explanation for this condition, and while the root cause of it is still undetermined, Paul Broca's theory of the muscle degeneration would lead to understanding the pathology of muscular dystrophy.

Paul Broca used hypnosis during surgical removal of an abscess and received mixed results, as the patient felt pain at the beginning which then went away, and she could not remember anything afterwards.

Because, of inconsistent results reported by other doctors, Paul Broca did not repeat in using hypnosis as an anesthetic.

In 1856, Paul Broca published On Aneurysms and their Treatment, a detailed, almost a thousand page long review of all accessible records on diagnosis and surgical and non treatment for these weakened blood vessels conditions.

In 1857, Paul Broca contributed to Charles-Edouard Brown-Sequard's work on the nervous system, conducting vivisection experiments, where specific spinal nerves were cut to demonstrate the spinal pathways for sensory and motor systems.

When western medicine discovered the qualities of the muscle relaxant curare, used by South American Indian hunters as poison, Paul Broca thought there was strong support for the incorrect idea that, aside from being applied topically, curare could be diluted and ingested to counter tetanus caused muscle spasms.

Paul Broca's wife had a known family history of carcinoma, and it is possible that this piqued his interest in exploring possible hereditary causes of cancer.

Paul Broca stated two hypotheses for the cause of cancer, diathesis and infection.

Paul Broca then hypothesized that diathesis produces the first cancer cancer produces infection, and infection produces secondary multiple tumors, cachexia, and death.

Paul Broca spent much time at his Anthropological Institute studying skulls and bones.

In that sense, Paul Broca was a pioneer in the study of physical anthropology a part of which has been called 'scientific racism.

Paul Broca published around 223 papers on general anthropology, physical anthropology, ethnology, and other branches of this field.

Paul Broca founded the Societe d'Anthropologie de Paris in 1859, the Revue d'Anthropologie in 1872,.

Paul Broca first became acquainted with anthropology through the works of Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Antoine Etienne Reynaud Augustin Serres and Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Breau, and by the late 1850s it became his lifetime interest.

In 1857, Paul Broca was presented with a hybrid leporid, a result of a cross species reproduction between a rabbit and hare.

In 1858, Paul Broca presented these findings on leporids to the Societe de Biologie.

Paul Broca believed that the key element of his work was its implication that physical differences between human races could be explained by them being different species with different origins rather than the single moment of creation.

Paul Broca agreed, but was adamant for the discussion to continue, so in 1859 he formed the Societe d'Anthropologie.

Paul Broca saw European colonization of other territories as justified by its being an attempt to civilize the barbaric populations.

Paul Broca saw each racial group as its own species, connected to a geographic location.

Per the standard of the time, Paul Broca would refer to the Caucasian racial group as white, and to the Ethiopian racial group as Negro.

Paul Broca considered Celts, Gauls, Greeks, Persians and Arabs to be distinct races that were part of the Caucasian racial group.

Paul Broca thought that the distinct geographic location of each racial group was one of the main problems with the monogenists argument for common ancestry:.

Paul Broca felt that there was not enough evidence for the theory that appearance of different races could be changed by the qualities of the environments that they lived in.

Paul Broca pointed out that his opponents were unable to provide similar long-term comparisons.

Paul Broca, influenced by previous work of Samuel George Morton, used the concept of hybridity as his primary argument against monogenism, and that it was flawed to see all of humanity as a single species.

At that time, Paul Broca thought of each racial group was independently created by nature.

Paul Broca was against slavery and disturbed by extinction of native populations caused by colonization.

Paul Broca thought that monogenism was often used to justify such actions, when it was argued that, if all races were of a single origin then "the lower status of non-Caucasians" was caused by how their race acted following creation.

Paul Broca developed numerous instruments and data points that were the basis of current methods of medical and archeological craniometry.

Unlike Morton, who believed that a subject's brain size was the main indicator of intelligence, Paul Broca thought that there were other factors that were more important.

Paul Broca thought that the most important aspect, was the relative size between the frontal and rear areas of the brain, with Caucasians having a larger frontal area than Negroes.

Paul Broca eventually came to the conclusion that larger skulls were not associated with higher intelligence, but still believed brain size was important in some aspects such as social progress, material security, and education.

Paul Broca compared cranial capacity of different types of Parisian skulls.

In 1861 Paul Broca published On the Phenomenon of Hybridity two years after Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published.

Paul Broca came to reject polygenism as applied to humans, conceding that all races were of single origin.

Ultimately, Paul Broca believed that there had to be a process that ran parallel to evolution, to fully explain the origins of, and divergences, between different species.

Paul Broca is celebrated for his theory that the speech production center of the brain is located on the left side of the brain and for pinpointing the location to the ventroposterior region of the frontal lobes.

Paul Broca arrived at this discovery by studying the brains of aphasic patients.

In 1861, Paul Broca visited a patient in the Bicetre Hospital named Louis Victor Leborgne, who had a 21-year progressive loss of speech and paralysis but not a loss of comprehension nor mental function.

Paul Broca was nicknamed "Tan" due to his inability to clearly speak any words other than "tan".

Leborgne died several days later due to an uncontrolled infection and resultant gangrene, Paul Broca performed an autopsy, hoping to find a physical explanation for Leborgne's disability.

Paul Broca determined that, as predicted, Leborgne did in fact have a lesion in the frontal lobe in one of the cerebral hemispheres, which in this case turned out to be the left.

One day after Tan's death Paul Broca presented his findings to the anthropological society.

Paul Broca found a lesion that encompassed much the same area as had been affected in Leborgne's brain.

Paul Broca published his findings from the autopsies of the twelve patients in his paper "Localization of Speech in the Third Left Frontal Cultivation" in 1865.

Paul Broca's work inspired others to perform careful autopsies with the aim of linking more brain regions to sensory and motor functions.

Dax died soon after this presentation and it was not reported or published until after Paul Broca made his initial findings.

However, the brains of Leborgne and Lelong had been preserved whole; Paul Broca had never sliced them to reveal the other damaged structures beneath.

Paul Broca presented his study on Leborgne in 1861 in the Bulletin of the Societe Anatomique.

In 1868 Charles Darwin criticized Paul Broca for believing in the existence of a tailless mutant of the Ceylon junglefowl, described in 1807 by the Dutch aristocrat, zoologist and museum director Coenraad Jacob Temminck.

Paul Broca was one of the first anthropologists engaged in comparative anatomy of primates and humans.

Paul Broca played a major role in the localization of function debate, by resolving the issue scientifically with Leborgne and his 12 cases thereafter.

Paul Broca's research led others to discover the location of a wide variety of other functions, specifically Wernicke's area.

Recent anatomical neuroimaging studies have shown that the pars opercularis of Paul Broca's area is anatomically smaller in individuals who stutter whereas the pars triangularis appears to be normal.

Paul Broca invented more than 20 measuring instruments for the use in craniology, and helped standardize measuring procedures.

Paul Broca's name is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.