Today’s Fitful, Irreverent, Grossly Profane Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Phineas Gage is probably the most famous person to have survived severe damage to the brain. He is also the first patient from whom we learned something about the relation between personality and the function of the front parts of the brain. Phineas Gage was the foreman of a railway construction gang working for the contractors preparing the bed for the Rutland and Burlington Rail Road near Cavendish, Vermont. On September 13, 1848, an accidental explosion of a charge he had set blew his tamping iron through his head. The tamping iron was 3 feet 7 inches long and weighed 13 1/2 pounds. It was 1 1/4 inches in diameter at one end (not circumference as in the newspaper report) and tapered over a distance of about 1-foot to a diameter of 1/4 inch at the other. The tamping iron went in point first under his left cheek bone and completely out through the top of his head, landing about 25 to 30 yards behind him. Phineas was knocked over but may not have lost consciousness even though most of the front part of the left side of his brain was destroyed. Dr. John Martyn Harlow, the young physician of Cavendish, treated him with such success that he returned home to Lebanon, New Hampshire 10 weeks later.
Some months after the accident, probably in about the middle of 1849, Phineas felt strong enough to resume work. But because his personality had changed so much, the contractors who had employed him would not give him his place again. Before the accident he had been their most capable and efficient foreman, one with a well-balanced mind, and who was looked on as a shrewd smart business man. He was now fitful, irreverent, and grossly profane, showing little deference for his fellows. He was also impatient and obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, unable to settle on any of the plans he devised for future action. His friends said he was “No longer Gage.”
As far as we know Phineas never worked at the level of a foreman again. According to Dr. Harlow, Phineas appeared at Barnum’s American Museum in New York City, worked in the livery stable of the Dartmouth Hotel (Hanover, NH), and drove coaches and cared for horses in Valparaiso, Chile. In about 1859, after his health began to fail he went to San Francisco to live with his mother. After he regained his health he was anxious to work and found it on a farm in Santa Clara County, south of San Francisco. In February 1860, he began to have epileptic seizures and, as we know from the Funeral Director’s and cemetery interment records, he was buried on May 23, 1860.
Culled from: Deakin University
The bar, along with Phineas’ skull, is still on display at the Warren Anatomical Museum at Harvard. And recently the only known photograph of Phineas was uncovered!
I was just thinking about this guy last night! I was trying to remember his last name. Good name for a railroad man, Gage.
That was certainly a terrible accident. Amazingly that he might not even have been knocked out.
Totally amazing!
I thought it was a good name for a band too. Phineas Gage. Probably already is one…
I’ve been researching Phineas Gage for three years and (trust me) it makes Google, newspaper, and other searches very tedious when looking for “railroad” and “gage” together. (“Mort-gage” comes up a lot as well broken over a line break, as well as accident stories reporting that “the lug-gage [or bag-gage] car left the tracks” and so on).
Read up on Gage at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage
Actually, there are *several* bands named “Phineas Gage” (or variations on that).
Wow, he was kind of hot. A lot of people in pics from back then look pretty awful.
Matthew, when you use Google you can narrow down a search by using quotes, like “Phineas Gage.” That way you’ll only come up with links about the man himself or somebody named him, rather than say, a story by Donna Gage that just once mentions a pet goldfish named Phineas. Also will cut down on hits on sites that have misspelled the railroad “gauge.”