I was sitting in my Introduction to Psychology class, it was the first class I had as a college freshman when I first heard the name, Phineas Gage. Not really paying attention until the picture of his skull showed up on the screen, holes made from an iron rod. You could see exactly where the rod went through his cheek and through the top of his skull. This immediately pulled me in and I wanted to learn more than what was said in the notes. As soon as I got back to my dorm I researched him combing over every fascinating detail on how his personality changed from the accident.
Phineas Gage seemed to live a normal life growing up, he grew up on a family farm in New Hampshire. At the ripe age of 25, Gage was a part of the crew that was cutting the railroad bed in Vermont. He took to working on the railways with construction with the Rutland and Burlington Railroad Company. His job was to clear the rocks and level the ground and to do this, he had to place an explosive into the rock deep enough to where he had to drill a hole. The hole was then filled with gunpowder and a fuse placed inside. For safety measures, sand was added so that when the tamping rod was used to pack the explosives into the rock nothing went wrong.
It was on September 13, 1848, when he was using an iron rod to pack the explosive powder into a hole that he knew he fucked up. The powder detonated causing the 43 inches long, 13.25 pound, iron rod to shoot itself into his left cheek, ripping itself through his brain, before coming back out of his skull and landing several feet away.
Surprisingly still conscious, although blind in one eye, he held part of his brain in his hands while waiting to see a doctor. When he finally sees the doctor he was even aware enough to say to him, “Here is business enough for you.”
Everything was going well until 10 days after the accident when everything seemed to go downhill. Gage was barely conscious, and the doctors thought the end was near for him. He only had one eye and a hole in his skull that was covered with a thin layer of skin, it was a miracle he lived this long. To their surprise he managed to survive and within months regained all strength and was able to go back to work. Gage seemed to be back to normal physically. He had no speech or motor impairments, and his memory even seemed to be in tack. The issue was with his personality.
For the next few months, a doctor by the name of John Martyn Harlow treated Gage. The most pressing issue was actually not physical, due to the trauma and the part of the area of the brain that was destroyed, Gage’s personality completely changed. His friends claimed that he was no longer himself saying he was restless, disrespectful, and unreliable. The railroad company he worked for even refused to take him back as an employee because he was no longer the same model employee they had hired. The once nice and caring man was gone and left in his place was the weird uncle no one wanted around.
According to Harlow, he had no balance between his intellectual side and animalistic side causing him to act out in a way that was not socially acceptable. He could no longer stick to the plans he had prior to the accident or even after and would even utter profanity and disturbing content in public. He also had no regard for how his actions or words were affecting those around him, and due to this lost a lot of friends. Since he was now jobless and friendless he went to New Hampshire driving coaches and then eventually went to San Francisco to be with family.
Around 1859, his health began to fail again and he went to San Francisco to live with his mother and sister who had moved there at the beginning of the gold-rush in hope of fortune. After Gage regained his health he was anxious to work but found a job on a farm in Santa Clara County. In February 1860, he began to have epileptic seizures that were most likley from either an infection or the accident itself, although it is still unclear as the records aren’t as in depth as they are today. In May of 1860, 11 years after the accident, Gage passed away in California.
It was the next year that I was sitting in Darrin Roger’s office when he pulled out a 3D printed model of the actual skull, painted and everything. He was by far my favorite professor in the psychology department, and always puts a smile on my face as he offers candy and enthusiastically waves to his students in the hallways.
The skull looked almost real, the only defining thing being the weight. His excitement about striked me and brought back the feeling of intense curiosity that I first had when I saw the skull. As we spent half an hour just admiring the skull and talking about the wonders of psychology. The conversation started with Phineas but somehow at the end he was almost forgotten as we chatted like old friends about whatever we could think about for the rest of his office hours that day.
Gage was an important part of not only psychology but also neuroscience and seen as paving the way for the first brain surgery that would take place in 1855. During the 19th century it was a huge debate between the medical and science community about the different areas of the brain. Did they each control a different aspect of the body? The personality? No one knew, but the damage to his frontal lobe and the personality changes proved that each part of the brain controls different behaviors. To this day Gage’s skull and the iron tamping rod are on display at a permanent exhibition at Harvard Medical School’s Warren Anatomical Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Even today, going into my Senior year at Fredonia, I have kept that Introduction to Psychology textbook. The purple cover tattered and ripped, either from being in my backpack or the constant flipping through I have done over the years. The goldfish on the front being the only undamaged part, and the chapters still bookmarked with labels that somehow have held up very well. Every so often finds myself flipping through it remembering what pulled me into the love I have for Psychology.
Works Cited
O’Driscoll, Kieran, and John Paul Leach. “‘No Longer Gage’: an Iron Bar through the Head : Early Observations of Personality Change after Injury to the Prefrontal Cortex.” BMJ : British Medical Journal, U.S. National Library of Medicine, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1114479/.
Paulson, Steve. “How Phineas Gage’s Freak Accident Changed Brain Science.” Wisconsin Public Radio, 17 Oct. 2020, www.wpr.org/how-phineas-gages-freak-accident-changed-brain-science.
“Phineas Gage.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., www.britannica.com/biography/Phineas-Gage.
“Phineas Gage: Neuroscience’s Most Famous Patient.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 1 Jan. 2010, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/phineas-gage-neurosciences-most-famous-patient-11390067/.
The University of Akron. “Phineas Gage’s Story.” The University of Akron, www.uakron.edu/gage/story.dot.