Paul Broca

Founder of French Anthropology, Explorer of the Brain

Francis Schiller

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9780520315938
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520315945
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Physical Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This elegant and comprehensive scientific biography recounts the life of Paul Broca, one of the world's most inventive and prolific scientists, whose work touched not only the fields of surgery, neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and the neuropathology of speech, but statistics, hypnosis, blood transfusion, and the grounding of the French school of anthropology, as well. Although Broca is known primarily for providing the working basis for all future cerebral localization (he was the first to identify "Broca's area" --a small patch on the convoluted surface of the brain--as the central organ for speech), this portrait of Broca also describes his fundamental role in the establishment of modern scientific "laboratory" medicine, and his broad capacity and appetite for science as a whole. His enduring curiosity and insistent pursuit of truth led him through an exciting course of study, which often placed him philosophically in the position of utilizing doubt as his strongest investigative impetus. The author, Francis Schiller, --himself a neurologist-- underscores Broca's vast contributions to both practical and moral science with keen insights and scholarly acumen. Historians of science, neuroscientists, and general readers alike will enjoy this enlightening and important biography.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.

Many titles in the Voices Revived program are also newly available as ebooks, offered at a discounted price to support wider access to scholarly work.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• I Sainte-Foy-la-Grande
• II Carabin
• III Upheaval One
• IV Upheaval Two
• V Cancer and the Microscope
• VI Trifles and Tribulations
• VII Rickets to Rotifers
• VIII Founding, Fathering, Feuding
• IX The Human Group
• X A Manner of Not Speaking
• XI Portraits and Projects
• XII The Flaws of Evolution
• XIII Group Inhumanity
• XIV Around the Great Limbic Lobe of the Mammals
• XV “Irremovable"
• XVI Epilogue: The Statue
• References to Bibliography (by chapter)
• Broca Bibliography
• General Bibliography
• Index