Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Phineas Gage is often referred to as one of the most famous patients in neuroscience. He experienced a traumatic brain injury when an iron rod was driven through his entire skull, destroying much of his frontal lobe. Gage miraculously survived the accident.
However, his personality and behavior were so changed as a result that many of his friends described him as an almost different person entirely. On September 13, , the thenyear-old Gage was working as the foreman of a crew preparing a railroad bed near Cavendish, Vermont. He was using an iron tamping rod to pack explosive powder into a hole. Unfortunately, the powder detonated, sending the inch-long and 1.
The rod penetrated Gage's left cheek, tore through his brain, and exited his skull before landing 80 feet away. Gage not only survived the initial injury but was able to speak and walk to a nearby cart so he could be taken into town to be seen by a doctor. He was still conscious later that evening and was able to recount the names of his co-workers.
Gage even suggested that he didn't wish to see his friends since he would be back to work in "a day or two" anyway. Descriptions of Gage's injury and mental changes were made by Dr.
John Martyn Harlow. Much of what researchers know about the case is based on Harlow's observations. After developing an infection, Gage then spent September 23 to October 3 in a semi-comatose state.
On October 7, he took his first steps out of bed and by October 11 his intellectual functioning began to improve. Harlow noted that Gage knew how much time had passed since the accident and remembered clearly how the accident occurred, but had difficulty estimating size and amounts of money. Within a month, Gage was well enough to leave the house. In the months that followed, Gage returned to his parents' home in New Hampshire to recuperate. When Harlow saw Gage again the following year, the doctor noted that while Gage had lost vision in his eye and was left with obvious scars from the accident, he was in good physical health and appeared recovered.
Popular reports of Gage often depict him as a hardworking, pleasant man prior to the accident. Post-accident, these reports describe him as a changed man, suggesting that the injury had transformed him into a surly, aggressive alcoholic who was unable to hold down a job.
Evidence suggests that many of the supposed effects of the accident may have been exaggerated and that he was actually far more functional than previously reported. Harlow presented the first account of the changes in Gage's behavior following the accident. Where Gage had been described as energetic, motivated, and shrewd prior to the accident, many of his acquaintances explained that after the injury he was "no longer Gage. Since there is little direct evidence of the exact extent of Gage's injuries aside from Harlow's report, it is difficult to know exactly how severely his brain was damaged.
Harlow's accounts suggest that the injury did lead to a loss of social inhibition, leading Gage to behave in ways that were seen as inappropriate. 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. These remarks are frequently elaborated into a Gage who drifts around aimlessly and is not interested in working or, if interested, is incapable of holding a job.
During the same period, Phineas is often pictured as exhibiting himself, usually as a freak, in circuses or fairgrounds around the country. Similarly, these stories turn Gage into a fairground freak because it is in such places that freaks are or were once seen. There we know he drove stage coaches. Before then we know he was barely well enough to do a full day's work on his parent's farm until June of , just well enough to travel to Boston in November of that year, and was still described in as failing in bodily powers.
As soon as he saw the object the one-eyed man held, Spurlock knew it was not a harpoon. Too short. No wooden shaft. It looked more like a tamping iron, he thought. Instantly, a name popped into his head: Phineas Gage. 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.
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