Jigsaw for April 19, 2026 Phineas Gage
Many of us have heard of Phineas Gage and his famous construction accident in Cavendish, Vermont.
The gist of the story is that he survived an iron bar going through his head. That alone has fascinated people around the world and generated scholarly articles for over 170 years.
I had always pictured a man with a bar sticking out the top and bottom of his skull. But the reality is that the tamping iron blew completely through his head and landed several yards away. Phineas was helped (not carried!) into a cart, and brought into town.
Shortly thereafter, a Dr. Edward Williams arrived to find Phin. Gage sitting upright on the piazza of Mr. Adams’ hotel with a hole through his skull, calmly telling bystanders what had happened to him.
I remembered him quoted: “I’m going to need some doctoring.”
The actual line was: “Doctor, here is business enough for you.” By his own account, he never even lost consciousness.
The follow-up story, as most of us learned it, is that he survived but his personality was forever changed. He became irascible, unlikable, and “indulged at times in the grossest profanity.” But looking into it again now, it turns out those accounts were written by Dr. Harlow twenty years after the fact. And the change didn’t last his whole life.
In the years that followed, Gage worked at the Dartmouth Inn’s livery stable in Hanover, living in Lebanon. In 1852, he was recruited to work in Chile, where he drove a six-horse stagecoach on a 13-hour, 100-mile journey over rough mountain roads from Valparaiso to Santiago.
He stayed for nearly eight years, until the railroad came through. He returned to live with his parents in San Francisco, and died of epilepsy complications the next year, in his 36th year.
If you’re steady enough to handle a six-horse team on mountain roads in South America for that long, you’re probably pretty much in control of your faculties. The myth of a permanent change of character, repeated until quite recently, did him a disservice. What he went through looks a lot like what doctors see in brain injury patients today: impulse problems, a shorter fuse, difficulty reading social cues.
There’s a lot to read about Phineas Gage.
To explore further, visit some of my sources:
A few chapters of Malcolm Macmillan’s “An Odd Kind of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage,” the definitive scholarly book
Everything You Know About Phineas Gage Is Wrong
Some new facts, including his time P.T. Barnum’s “freakshow “museum in New York
Phineas was born in Lebanon, injured in Cavendish, recovered in Lebanon, worked in Hanover. I think of him every time I drive to Okemo.
Finally, a psychology professor and his students made a stop-motion Lego movie recreating the accident.
Of course they did.
Thanks for reading, as always.
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Cameron Cross
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A really interesting piece, this. I wasn't aware of this historical event until now. The link to the Harvard Neuro Blog is well worth a read.