Broca’s legacy: fame not shame

Abstract

I read the article ‘Paul Broca: from fame to shame?’ with great interest.1 Its balanced presentation compels the readership to weigh in on one view or the other—especially since the title ends in a question mark! Broca, born and raised in the Bordeaux region of France, was unquestionably one of the great clinical neuroanatomists of the 19th century. This recognition led to naming a neuroscience building at the University of Bordeaux after him; this decision is now questioned because of his beliefs in physical anthropology.1 The Broca example is more useful to study if we begin by placing his ideas into the context of his time. Before race became ‘a baseless social construct,’1 intellectual elite and religious scholars had already been discussing the origin of ‘mankind’ (note, the use of the currently preferred term ‘humankind’ would be anachronistic) for centuries. Charles Darwin’s Origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life was published in 1859 and his second major work on evolution, The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex, was published in 1871. These works, and their spirited discussion among religious and secular scholars, quickly and radically changed thoughts about mankind’s origin. These discussions in Paris were further complicated by an ongoing battle between secular savants and the Roman Catholic Church; as the 19th century progressed, French society became progressively more secular.2,3 Contemporary scholars, who were not strictly wedded to a literal interpretation of creationism, were split between two opposing, but not directly testable, theories: monogenism (humanity had a single origin) and polygenism (human races are of different origins). Monogenism was compatible with scientific variations on creationism that were proliferating; polygenism was incompatible and almost uniformly embraced by secular French scholars by the 1820s. Atheist members of the lay public favoured polygenism because it contradicted the biblical account of human creation and because it appeared more scientific. It should be remembered that Broca had founded a society of ‘freethinkers’ (at the time, essentially a synonym for atheists) in Paris in 1848 and the Société d’anthropologie de Paris in 1859, the year Darwin published Origin of species.2,3