Paul Broca made the most significant discovery in nineteenth-century human biology when he found that speech resides within the left frontal lobe of the human brain. As a young surgeon working at the hospice at Bicetre on the outskirts of Paris - a repository for the criminal, the insane, the indigent, and the sick - Broca had to overcome derision, acrimony, personal attacks, vindictiveness, and prevailing doctrines before his findings were accepted. Based on a new reading and translation of original records by Broca, Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud, and Gustave Dax, Fearful Asymmetry recounts the...