June 28, 1824

Paul Broca (June 28, 1824 to July 9, 1880) the French scientist and anthropologist, built on a tradition of physiological research, and one of these researchers was his colleague, Pierre Gratiolet ( 1815-1865) who wrote Cerebral Folds of Man and the Primates (published in French in 1854). In summarizing the history of the research issues he and Broca studied -- the brain folds (gyri or convolutions) -- Gratiolet writes:

Vesalius, Th. Bartholinus, or Galen for that matter...attach little importance to them. 

In his text Gratiolet quotes Th. Bartholinus, (Thomas Bartholin 1616-1680) to make this point:

[T]he convolutions have the appearance of intestines; they are not made for the intellect as Erasistratus holds, --asses have them too-- nor for any purpose or use as others think; but in order to...protect the cerebral vessels against the danger of rupture from violent movement especially during full moon when the brain swells in the skull....

Gratiolet goes on: 

But one of the greatest anatomists of modern times returns to the idea of Erasistratus....

and here Gratiolet quotes Thomas Willis (1621-1675), from Cerebri Anatome, 1676:

The manifold tendencies of the animal spirits require multiple cerebral folds and convolutions for the storage of sensory impressions as if in various cellars or warehouses, and so enable these impressions to be evoked for any given occasion...The gyri are few in quadrupeds, yet in some, such as the cat, they are found in a certain pattern; wherefore these animals can meditate and reminisce, though hardly anything except what the instincts and needs of nature...suggest.

This last quote was a translation (from Willis's Latin) done by the author, Francis Schiller, of a biography of Broca: Paul Broca, Founder of French Anthropology, Explorer of the Brain (1979).

Let's conclude with the next part of Gratiolet's historical sketch:

Despite the importance attached to them [the gyri] since the seventeenth century...no anatomist up to the end of the last century has tried to discover the law of their arrangement in man.

So Paul Broca did not originate the idea of certain localized areas of the brain having mental functions. The proof of this, with Broca using his surgical and anatomical skills, was his. Paul Broca later died of a brain hemorrhage. An early edition of Schiller's biography of Broca is available to read free online.