Paul Broca
Paul Pierre Broca was a French physician, anatomist and anthropologist. He is best known for his research on Broca's area, a region of the frontal lobe that is named after him. Broca's area is involved with language. His work revealed that the brains of patients with aphasia contained lesions in a particular part of the cortex, in the left frontal region. This was the first anatomical proof of localization of brain function.
Broca's work contributed to the development of physical anthropology, advancing the science of anthropometry, and craniometry, in particular, the now-discredited practice of determining intelligence. He was engaged in comparative anatomy of primates and humans and proposed that Negroes were an intermediate form between apes and Europeans. He saw each racial group as its own species and believed racial mixing eventually led to sterility.
Biography
Paul Broca was born on 28 June 1824 in Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, Gironde, France, the son of Jean Pierre "Benjamin" Broca, a medical practitioner and former surgeon in Napoleon's service, and Annette Thomas, well-educated daughter of a Calvinist, Reformed Protestant, preacher. Huguenot Broca received basic education in the school in his hometown, earning a bachelor's degree at the age of 16. He entered medical school in Paris when he was 17, and graduated at 20, when most of his contemporaries were just beginning as medical students.After graduating, Broca undertook an extensive internship, first with the urologist and dermatologist Philippe Ricord at the Hôpital du Midi, then in 1844 with the psychiatrist François Leuret at the Bicêtre Hospital. In 1845, he became an intern with Pierre Nicolas Gerdy, a great anatomist and surgeon. After two years with Gerdy, Broca became his assistant. In 1848, Broca became the Prosector, performing dissections for lectures of anatomy, at the University of Paris Medical School. In 1849, he was awarded a medical doctorate. In 1853, Broca became professor agrégé, and was appointed surgeon of the hospital. He was elected to the chair of external pathology at the Faculty of Medicine in 1867, and one year later professor of clinical surgery. In 1868, he was elected a member of the Académie de medicine, and appointed the chair of clinical surgery. He served in this capacity until his death. He also worked for the Hôpital St. Antoine, the Pitié, the Hôtel des Clinques, and the Hôpital Necker.
As a researcher, Broca joined the Société anatomique de Paris in 1847. During his first six years in the society, Broca was its most productive contributor. Two months after joining, he was on the society's journal editorial committee. He became its secretary and then vice president by 1851. Soon after its creation in 1848, Broca joined the Société de Biologie. He also joined and in 1865 became the president of the Societe de Chirurgie.
In parallel with his medical career, Broca founded in 1848 a society of free-thinkers, sympathetic to Charles Darwin's theories. He once remarked, "I would rather be a transformed ape than a degenerate son of Adam". This brought him into conflict with the church, which regarded him as a subversive materialist and a corrupter of the youth. The church's animosity toward him continued throughout his lifetime, resulting in numerous confrontations between Broca and the ecclesiastical authorities.
In 1857, feeling pressured by others and especially his mother, Broca married Adele Augustine Lugol. She came from a Protestant family and was the daughter of prominent physician Jean Guillaume Auguste Lugol. The Brocas had three children: daughter Jeanne Francoise Pauline, son Benjamin Auguste, and son Élie André. One year later, Broca's mother died and his father, Benjamin, came to Paris to live with the family until his death in 1877.
In 1858, Broca was elected as member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In 1859, he founded the Society of Anthropology of Paris. In 1872, he founded the journal Revue d'anthropologie, and in 1876, the Institute of Anthropology. The French Church opposed the development of anthropology, and in 1876 organized a campaign to stop the teaching of the subject in the Anthropological Institute. In 1872, Broca was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society.
Near the end of his life, Broca was elected a senator for life, a permanent position in the French senate. He was also a member of the Académie française and held honorary degrees from many learned institutions both in France and abroad. He died of a brain hemorrhage on 9 July 1880, at the age of 56. During his life he was an atheist and identified as a Liberal. His wife died in 1914 when she was 79. Like their father, Auguste and Andre went on to study medicine. Auguste Broca became a professor of pediatric surgery, now known for his contribution to the Broca-Perthes-Blankart operation, while André became a professor of medical optics and is known for developing the Pellin-Broca prism.
Early work
Since the 1600s, the majority of medical advancements emerged through interaction in independent and sometimes secret societies. The Society Anatomique ''de Paris met every Friday and was chaired by anatomist Jean Cruveilhier, and interned by "the Father of French neurology" Jean-Martin Charcot; both of whom were instrumental in the later discovery of multiple sclerosis. At its meetings, members would make presentations regarding their scientific findings, which would then be published in the regular bulletin of the society's activities.Like Cruveilhier and Charcot, Broca made regular Society Anatomique presentations on musculoskeletal disorders. He 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. In their work on osteoarthritis, a form of arthritis, Broca and Amédée Deville, Broca showed that, like nails and teeth, cartilage is a tissue that requires absorption of nutrients from nearby blood vessels, and described in detail, the process that lead to degeneration of cartilage in joints. Broca also made regular presentations on the clubfoot disorder, a birth defect where infants feet are rotated inwards at birth. At the time Broca saw degeneration of muscle tissue as an explanation for this condition, and while the root cause of it is still undetermined, Broca's theory of the muscle degeneration would lead to understanding the pathology of muscular dystrophy. As an anatomist, Broca can be considered as making 250 separate contributions to medical science.
As a surgeon, Broca wrote a detailed review on recently discovered use of chloroform as anesthesia, as well as on his own experiences of using novel pain managing methods during surgery, such as hypnosis and carbon dioxide as a local anesthetics. 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, Broca did not repeat in using hypnosis as an anesthetic. Because of his patient's memory loss, he saw the most potential in using it as a psychological tool. In 1856, 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. This book was one of the first published monograms on a specific subject. Before his later achievements, it was this work, that Broca was known for by other French doctors.
In 1857, Broca contributed to Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard'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. As a result of this work. Brown-Séquard became known for demonstrating the principle of decussation, where a vertebrate's neural fibers cross from one lateral side to another, resulting in phenomenon of the right side of that animals brain controlling the left side of the other.
As a scientist, Broca also developed theories and made hypotheses that would eventually be disproven. Based on reported findings, for example, he published work in support of viewing syphilis as a virus. When western medicine discovered the qualities of the muscle relaxant curare, used by South American Indian hunters as poison, Broca thought there was strong support for the incorrect idea that, aside from being applied topically, curare could also be diluted and ingested to counter tetanus that caused muscle spasms.
Broca also spent many of his earlier years researching cancer. His wife had a known family history of carcinoma, and it is possible that this piqued his interest in exploring possible hereditary causes of cancer. In his investigations, he accumulated evidence supporting the hereditary nature of some cancers while also discovering that cancer cells can run through the blood. Many scientists were skeptical of Broca's hereditary hypothesis, with most believing that it is merely coincidental. He stated two hypotheses for the cause of cancer, diathesis and infection. He believed that the cause may lie somewhere between the two. He then hypothesized that diathesis produces the first cancer cancer produces infection, and infection produces secondary multiple tumors, cachexia, and death."
Anthropology
Broca spent much time at his Anthropological Institute studying skulls and bones. It has been argued that he was attempting to use the measurements obtained by these studies as his main criteria for ranking racial groups in order of superiority. In that sense, Broca was a pioneer in the study of physical anthropology a part of which has been called 'scientific racism.' He advanced the science of cranial anthropometry by developing many new types of measuring instruments and numerical indices. He published around 223 papers on general anthropology, physical anthropology, ethnology, and other branches of this field. He founded the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris in 1859, the Revue d'Anthropologie in 1872,Broca first became acquainted with anthropology through the works of Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Antoine Étienne Reynaud Augustin Serres and Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau, and by the late 1850s it became his lifetime interest. Broca defined Anthropology as "the study of the human group, considered as whole." Like other scientists, he rejected relying on religious texts, and looked for a scientific explanation of human origins.
In 1857, Broca was presented with a hybrid leporid, a result of a cross species reproduction between a rabbit and hare. The crossbreeding was done for commercial rather than scientific reasons, as the resulting hybrids became very popular pets. Specific circumstances had to be set up in order for differently behaving species to reproduce and for their hybrid descendants to be able to reproduce between themselves. To Broca, the fact that different animals are able to intermix and create fertile offspring did not prove that they were of the same species.
In 1858, Broca presented these findings on leporids to the Société de Biologie. He 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. While Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species did not come out until the following year, the topic of human origin was already widely discussed in science, but still capable of producing a negative response from the government. Because of that worry, Pierre Rayer the president of the Société, along with other members with which Broca was on good relations, asked Broca to stop further discussion of the topic. Broca agreed, but was adamant for the discussion to continue, so in 1859 he formed the Société d'Anthropologie.