Images in clinical medicine. The tale of Phineas Gage, digitally remastered. N Engl J Med. Mapping connectivity damage in the case of Phineas Gage. PLoS One. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for VerywellMind. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page. These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data. We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification.
I Accept Show Purposes. Table of Contents View All. Table of Contents. Phineas Gage's Accident. Severity of Brain Damage.
Gage's Influence. Post-Accident Life. Was this page helpful? Thanks for your feedback! Sign Up. What are your concerns? Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy. Related Articles. What Are the Different Parts of the Brain? Spurlock knew the Gage story well enough to know that any photograph of him would be the first to come to light.
But the man in the Flickr photogragh seemed well-dressed and confident. It was Spurlock who told the Wilguses that the man in their daguerreotype might be Gage. After Beverly finished her online research, she and Jack concluded that the man probably was. She e-mailed a scan of the photograph to the Warren museum.
It had to be Gage, he determined. How many midth-century men with a mangled eye and scarred forehead had their portrait taken holding a metal tool? A tool with an inscription on it? In about , after his health began to fail, he went to San Francisco to live with his family who had moved there from Lebanon NH at the beginning of the gold-rush.
After Phineas regained his health he was anxious to work and found it on a farm in Santa Clara County, south of San Francisco. In February , he began to have epileptic seizures and, as we know from the Funeral Director's and cemetery interment records, he was buried on 23rd May Although Harlow gives the year as , the records show conclusively that it was Here, as elsewhere I have silently corrected Harlow's dates.
This is the bar that was shot through the head of Mr. Phinehas P. Gage at Cavendish, Vermont, Sept. Warren Anatomical Museum records discovered by Dominic Hall of the Countway Library since my book was published show that Phineas himself originally deposited the tamping iron in the Harvard Medical School Museum and asked for it to be returned in It also means that the tamping iron could not have been, as Dr.
What I have summarised is almost all of what Harlow tells us about Phineas Gage. The slightness of what he tells us seems to have encouraged the attribution to Gage of all sorts of fabulous psychological characteristics and an equally fabulous post-accident history. This is not surprising given that neither the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Medical Society nor Harlow's pamphlet version of his address are held in many of the world's libraries.
Most of the accounts of Gage's life after are strange mixtures of slight fact, considerable fancy and downright fabrication. Phineas Gage was an American railroad construction foreman born in On September 13th, , when Gage was 25 years old, he was working in Cavendish in Vermont, leading a crew which were preparing the Rutland and Burlington Railroad by blasting rocks to make a roadbed. This was done by using an iron tamping rod to pack the explosive powder into a hole.
The iron rod which was 43 inches long and 1. After the incident, Gage was thrown onto his back from the force of the iron rod and had some brief convulsion of the arms and legs. Within a few minutes however, Gage was able to get himself up, speak and walk with small assistance to a nearby cart so he could travel into town. A physician called Dr Edward H.
The top of the head appeared somewhat like an inverted funnel. Williams recalled that Gage vomited which lead to about a teacupful of his brain to fall upon the floor from the hole at the top of his skull. Dr John Martyn Harlow took over the case of Gage soon after.
Harlow reported that Gage was fully conscious and recognised Harlow at once but was tired from the bleeding. In the next couple of days, Harlow observed that Gage spoke with some difficulty but could name his friends and the bleeding ceased. Gage then spent September 23rd to October 3rd in a semi-comatose state but then was able to take steps out of bed by October 7th. Four years after his injury, Gage moved to Chile and worked in taking care of horses and being a stagecoach driver.
In , he moved to San Francisco, California where his mother and sister lived and was suffering from an illness, of which Harlow did not know the nature of. On May 21st, , twelve years after his accident, Gage died after having a series of repeated epileptic convulsions.
Marlow described him as follows:. He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity which was not previously his custom , manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operations, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible.
A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man. The accounts imply that the injury lead to a loss of social inhibition, meaning that Gage would behave in ways which were considered inappropriate. When Gage died in , no autopsies were performed until his skull was later recovered by Harlow years later.
The brain damage which caused the significant personality changes were presumed to have involve the left frontal region of the brain. It was not until that complex computer-based methods to examine the brain damage could be used to investigate whether other areas of the brain were affected.
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