  Most quark actions in lattice QCD encounter difficulties with chiral symmetry
and its spontaneous breakdown. Minimally doubled fermions (MDF) are a category
of strictly local chiral lattice fermions, whose continuum limit reproduces two
degenerate quark flavours. The two poles of their Dirac operator are aligned
such that symmetries under charge conjugation or reflection of one particular
direction are explictly broken at finite lattice spacing. Properties of MDF are
scrutinised with regard to broken symmetry and meson spectrum to discern their
suitability for numerical studies of QCD. Interactions induce anisotropic
operator mixing for MDF. Hence, restoration of broken symmetries in the
continuum limit requires three counterterms, one of which is power-law
divergent. Counterterms and operator mixing are studied perturbatively for two
variants of MDF. Two independent non-perturbative procedures for removal of the
power-law divergence are developed by means of a numerical study of hadronic
observables for one variant of MDF in quenched approximation. Though three out
of four pseudoscalar mesons are affected by lattice artefacts, the spectrum's
continuum limit is consistent with two-flavour QCD. Thus, suitability of MDF
for numerical studies of QCD in the quenched approximation is demonstrated.
