ABSTRACT
Paul Broca (1824–80), professor of clinical surgery in the faculty of medicine, had founded the Anthropological Society of Paris in 1859. At a meeting of the society two years later, Louis Pierre Gratiolet read a paper that challenged Broca’s most precious belief: Gratiolet dared to argue that the size of a brain bore no relationship to its degree of intelligence. The human body can be measured in a thousand ways. Any investigator, convinced beforehand of a group’s inferiority, can select a small set of measures to illustrate its greater affinity with apes. Broca’s cardinal bias lay in his assumption that human races could be ranked in a linear scale of mental worth. Inevitably, since Broca amassed so much disparate and honest data, he generated numerous anomalies and apparent exceptions to his guiding generality that size of brain records intelligence and that comfortable white males have larger brains than women, poor people, and lower races.
