In 1861, a French physician named Pierre Paul Broca described a handful of stroke patients who had been admitted to the hospital where he worked, all of whom had lost the ability to speak. Upon their death, Broca examined their brains, and noted that all of them were damaged in the same region of the left frontal lobe. Ten years later, the German pathologist Karl Wernicke described another group of stroke patients, who had lost the ability to understand spoken language due to damage affecting a region of the left temporal lobe.
