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Updated: June 23, 2025
But no positive evidence was forthcoming until 1861, when Dr. Paul Broca brought before the Academy of Medicine in Paris a case of brain lesion which he regarded as having most important bearings on the question of cerebral localization. The case was that of a patient at the Bicetre, who for twenty years had been deprived of the power of speech, seemingly through loss of memory of words.
A number of American and English-speaking physicians and surgeons responded to the appeal made by Doctor J.M. Gershberg, of New York, visiting physician to the Hopital Broca, and attended a meeting held at Professor Pozzi's dispensary to form an organization offering their medical and surgical services to the French Government and the Red Cross Society.
A gentleman residing in Marseilles had seen him while soliciting alms perform most astonishing feats of memory, and brought him to Paris. In the presence of the Society Broca gave him verbally a task in multiplication, composed of some trillions to be multiplied by billions.
In the basal portion, the vertebrae are likewise few, are united firmly together, and are arrested in development; but they have been rendered much broader and flatter than the corresponding vertebrae in the tails of other animals: they constitute what Broca calls the accessory sacral vertebrae.
These are of functional importance by supporting certain internal parts and in other ways; and their modification is directly connected with the erect or semi-erect attitude of man and the anthropomorphous apes. This conclusion is the more trustworthy, as Broca formerly held a different view, which he has now abandoned.
Broca, Prof., on the occurrence of the supra-condyloid foramen in the human humerus; anthropomorphous apes more bipedal than quadrupedal; on the capacity of Parisian skulls at different periods; comparison of modern and mediaeval skulls; on tails of quadrupeds; on the influence of natural selection; on hybridity in man; on human remains from Les Eyzies; on the cause of the difference between Europeans and Hindoos.
Before the Anthropological Society in 1880 Broca exhibited a lad of eleven, a Piedmontese, named Jacques Inaudi. This boy, with a trick monkey, had been found earning his livelihood by begging and by solving mentally in a few minutes the most difficult problems in arithmetic.
Broca is of opinion that it was done with a drill turned round and round in the skull in the way the French shepherds still treat diseases of the crania in their sheep.
It would be idle to take up in any detail the claims of phrenologist and palmist. The former had a very respectable start in the work of Broca and Gall in that the localization of function in the various parts of the brain made at least partly logical the belief that the conformation of the head also indicated functions of character.
This is particularly the case in the brain of a young male chimpanzee figured by M. Broca. Again, as respects the question of absolute size, it is established that the difference between the largest and the smallest healthy human brain is greater than the difference between the smallest healthy human brain and the largest chimpanzee's or orang's brain.
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