Curating aphasia: Pierre Paul Broca's Museological Science

In this article, the importance of the famous nineteenth-century surgeon Pierre Paul Broca's curatorial activities is assessed. Broca's curatorship secured his achievement in localising the function of speech, which was a watershed moment in the history of neuroscience. Historians have debated why Broca succeeded where others had failed, citing cultural, political and personal influences, but what has been overlooked in these previous discussions is the importance of Broca's depositing the brains of his aphasic patients in a museum of pathological anatomy. Broca's success is thus attributed to him being a faithful practitioner of the so-called 'museological' medicine developed by his revolutionary predecessors in the hospitals of Paris.