Paul Broca

Paul Pierre Broca was a French physician, anatomist and anthropologist, born in Sainte-Foy-la-Grande in 1824. He entered medical school in Paris at seventeen and graduated at twenty, then trained under surgeons and a psychiatrist before becoming prosector in anatomy at the Paris medical faculty in 1848. He is best known for Broca's area, a region of the left frontal lobe involved with language. Studying patients with aphasia, he found lesions in that region, which was the first anatomical proof that a brain function is localized. He later held the chair of clinical surgery in Paris and was a leading figure in physical anthropology and craniometry, work whose racial claims are now discredited. He died in 1880.