Paul Broca

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Paul Broca

Pierre Paul Broca (born  June 28, 1824 in Sainte-Foy-la-Grande , Gironde department , † July 9, 1880 in Paris ) was a French surgeon , anatomist , pathologist and anthropologist . After him u. a. named a severe language disorder, the so-called Broca aphasia (see case of "Monsieur Tan"), as well as the corresponding brain region ( Broca area ). In 1878 he first described a “large limbic lobe”, which is now called the limbic system .

Life

Pierre Paul Broca was born into a Protestant family. The father Benjamin Broca was a doctor and surgeon in the Imperial Army, the mother Annette Thomas the daughter of a Protestant pastor who was mayor of Bordeaux during the revolution .

Gifted, he also became a Baccalaureus in literature, mathematics and physics. He enrolled in the Paris University Medical School at seventeen and graduated at the age of twenty.

Broca became Professor of Surgical Pathology at the University of Paris (then: Académie de Paris ) and devoted himself to medical research in several areas. At the age of 24 he was already famous, showered with awards and prizes.

He seems to have had a remarkable character. His contemporaries described him as "generous, sensitive and amiable". In 1848 he founded the Société des libres-penseurs (Freethinkers Society), supported the theory of Darwin's natural selection and was reported as a subversive materialist who spoiled youth.

Broca has authored hundreds of books and articles, 53 of them on the brain. He sought to improve health care for the destitute and campaigned for public health. Paul Topinard and Joseph Deniker are among his students .

Broca died at the age of 56 on July 8 or 9, 1880, probably from a cerebral haemorrhage resulting from the rupture of a cerebral artery aneurysm . His successor as a zoological anthropologist was the histologist and anatomist Mathias Marie Duval (1844–1907).

Scientific work

His first scientific papers are contributions to the histology of cartilage and bones, but he also studies cancer , the treatment of aneurysm, and child mortality. His work on neuroanatomy has contributed to a better understanding of the limbic system and the olfactory cortex (rhinencephalon).

In 1859 Broca and his colleague Eugène Azam reported to the Académie des sciences about a surgical procedure under hypnotic anesthesia .

The case of "Monsieur Tan"

Brain of Monsieur Tan

What secures Broca a place in medical history is his discovery of the language center in the brain, now known as Broca's area , located in the third gyrus of the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere.

Around 1860 he studied patients with aphasia (speech disorder). His first patient named Leborgne at the Paris Hôpital Kremlin-Bicêtre could only pronounce the syllable 'Tan', which is why he was nicknamed "Tan". Speech comprehension, on the other hand, did not seem to be impaired: he was still quite able to understand questions put to him. "Monsieur Tan" tried to answer the questions by prosodic articulation of various stress patterns, pitches and strings of this one syllable. Post-mortem autopsy revealed that part of the left hemisphere between the frontal and temporal lobes had a neurosyphilitic lesion .

Broca concluded from this that this position must be significantly involved in the language production . Broca's findings gave rise to the idea of lateralization , i.e. the “asymmetrical representation of certain functions in the brain”.

He presented his discovery in 1861 in the Société d'anthropologie de Paris (Anthropological Society of Paris) in the course of a heated discussion with the proponents of the holistic brain theory.

The Broca area is one of several areas in the brain that together form the language center : While the Wernicke center (named after Carl Wernicke ) serves to understand language , the Broca area significantly controls the generation (motor skills) of language.

Anthropological research

Broca is also a pioneer in physical anthropology . In 1859 he founded the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris and in 1876 the École d'anthropologie . He develops new measuring instruments and new numerical indices for craniometry . The use and misuse of its measurements and inferences by racist ideologies has been extensively discussed by Stephen Jay Gould . Broca himself has given rise to racist interpretations of his research. He had formulated the hypothesis that “the relative smallness of a woman's brain depends on her physical and intellectual inferiority”.

Comparative anatomy

Another area Broca has researched is the comparative anatomy of primates . He discovered traces of healing on trephined skulls from the Neolithic for the first time . He was interested in the relationship between the human skull and the brain with its mental properties and intelligence. He denied the thesis of Friedrich Tiedemann , who claimed that the black and white races could not be differentiated according to their skull capacity, and measured human skulls to support his hypothesis that the smallness of their brains represented a characteristic inferiority of primitive peoples: «  On a vu que la capacity cranienne des nègres de l'Afrique occidentale (1,372.12 cm³) est inférieure d'environ 100 cm³ à cell des races d'Europe.  »

After all, Broca was also a pioneer in brain imaging. He invented a "thermometric crown," which he hoped would measure changes in the temperature of the skull caused by changes in brain activity.

The Broca Index developed by Broca is used to easily determine a person's normal weight, but is less precise than the Body Mass Index (BMI) and is no longer used.

Darwin versus Broca

In 1868, British naturalist Charles Darwin criticized Broca for believing in the existence of a tailless mutant of the Ceylon chicken described by Dutch zoologist Coenraad Jacob Temminck in 1807.

honors and awards

Towards the end of his life, Broca was elected Sénateur à vie (Senator for life). He was a member of the Académie de médicine and was honored by several French and foreign institutions. He was a corresponding member of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory . In 1858 Broca was elected a member of the Leopoldina Scholars' Academy .

Broca's name is mentioned on the Eiffel Tower in a list of 72 names . The Hôpital Broca, a public hospital in Paris specializing in gerontology, bears his name, as does one of the three medical faculties of the Université Bordeaux II and the asteroid (340479) Broca . The vocational high school in his hometown Ste-Foy la Grande bears his name.

See also

Web links

References and comments

  1. ^ Daniel Frédy: Paul Broca. In: Histoire des sciences médicales, Vol. XXX / 2, 1996, p. 199.
  2. Barbara I. Tshisuaka: Duval, Mathias Marie. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 329.
  3. Christoph Hermann & Christian Fiebach: Brain & Language . Verlag Clausen & Bosse, Leck 2004, p. 6.
  4. ^ Bulletin de la société française d'anthropologie . Text n ° 1: meeting on April 18, 1861, vol. 2, pp. 235-238; Text n ° 2: Meeting on April 16, 1863, vol. 4, pp. 200-204. On-line
  5. Stephen Jay Gould: The Mismeasure of Man . Norton, New York 1981, ISBN 0-393-03972-2 (= The wrongly measured person . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1983, ISBN 3-518-28183-6 ).
  6. Paul Broca: Sur le volume et la forme du cerveau suivant les individus et suivant les races. P. 48, excerpt from Vol. II of the Bulletins de la Societé d'anthropologie, meetings of March 21 and May 2, 1861.
  7. Paul Broca: Sur le volume et la forme du cerveau suivant les individus et suivant les races (About volume and shape of the brain depending on individuals and races) , p. 15, excerpt from Vol. II of the Bulletins de la Société d'anthropologie , Meetings of March 21 and May 2, 1861.
  8. P. Broca: Sur les crânes de la caverne de l 'homme-mort. In: Revue d'Anthropologie , 1873/2, 1–53, quoted from Stephen Jay Gould: La Mal-mesure de l'homme. P. 97.
  9. Stephen Jay Gould: The Mismeasure of Man . Norton, New York 1981, ISBN 0-393-03972-2 . (= The wrongly measured person. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1983, ISBN 3-518-28183-6 .)
  10. L. Cohen, MJ Smith, V. Lroux-Hugon: Paul Broca's thermometric crown.
  11. Grouw, Hein van, Dekkers, Wim & Rookmaaker, Kees (2017). On Temminck's tailless Ceylon Junglefowl, and how Darwin denied their existence. Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club (London) , 137 (4), 261-271. doi : 10.25226 / bboc.v137i4.2017.a3