Tag: Paul Broca
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Paul Pierre Broca
JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom Fig 1. Paul Pierre Broca. US National Library of Medicine. At the turn of the nineteenth century, knowledge of how the brain worked was largely conjectural. Intelligence, memory, language, and motor and sensory functions had not been localized. The physiologist Flourens, promoting the notion of “cerebral equipotentiality,” concluded,…
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Broca’s Brains: A lesson in the importance of saving the history of neuroscience
Richard Brown Halifax, NS, Canada Thalia Garvock-de Montbrun Montreal, QC, Canada Figure 1. Brain of patient (Lelong) with aphasia studied by Broca. Photo taken by Richard Brown May 2017. Recent fires at the National Museum of Brazil and at the University of Cape Town in South Africa1,2 have shown the fragility of rare books,…
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The basest of the senses: medical unease with the sense of smell
Rebecca Shulman Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States “…the primitive organ of smell, the basest of the senses” – Patrick Suskind, Perfume Paul Broca, who mapped the parts of the human brain involved in olfaction and argued that they had been supplanted by free will. For the past two centuries, the medical profession has had…