Phineas Gage

Phineas P. Gage
The first identified (2009) portrait of Gage, here with his "constant companion for the remainder of his life"—his inscribed tamping iron.
Born	July 9, 1823 (date uncertain) Grafton Co., New Hampshire
Died	May 21, 1860(1860-05-21) (aged 36) In or near San Francisco
Cause of death	Status epilepticus
Resting place	Warren Anatomical Museum, Boston (skull) Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, California (other remains)
Occupations	Railroad construction foreman blaster stagecoach driver
Known for	Personality change after brain injury
Spouse	None
Children	None

Phineas P. Gage (1823 – May 21, 1860) was an American railroad construction foreman remembered for his improbable survival of a rock-blasting accident in which a large iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying much of his brain's left frontal lobe, and for that injury's reported effects on his personality and behavior over the remaining twelve years of his life—effects so profound that (for a time at least) friends saw him as "no longer Gage."

Long known as "the American Crowbar Case"—once termed "the case which more than all others is calculated to excite our wonder, impair the value of prognosis, and even to subvert our physiological doctrines"—Phineas Gage influenced nineteenth-century discussion about the mind and brain, particularly debate on cerebral localization, and was perhaps the first case to suggest that damage to specific parts of the brain might induce specific personality changes.

Gage is a fixture in the curricula of neurology, psychology, and related disciplines (see neuroscience), and is frequently mentioned in books and academic papers; he even has a minor place in popular culture. Despite this celebrity the body of established fact about Gage and what he was like (before or after his injury) is small, which has allowed "the fitting of almost any theory [desired] to the small number of facts we have" —Gage having been cited, over the years, in support of various theories of the brain entirely contradictory to one another. Historically, published accounts (including scientific ones) have almost always severely distorted and exaggerated Gage's behavioral changes, frequently contradicting the known facts.

A report of Gage's physical and mental condition shortly before his death implies that Gage's most serious mental changes were temporary, so that in later life he was far more functional, and socially far better adapted, than in the years immediately after his accident. A social recovery hypothesis suggests that Gage's employment as a stagecoach driver in Chile provided daily structure allowing him to relearn lost social and personal skills.

Background

Map of Cavendish, Vermont made twenty years after Gage's accident, with locations added in red: (A) Region of the accident site; (T) Gage's lodgings; (H) Harlow's home and surgery​

Gage was the first of five children born to Jesse Eaton Gage and Hannah Trussell (Swetland) Gage, of Grafton County, New Hampshire. Little is known about his upbringing and education, but he is known to have been literate.

Town doctor John Martyn Harlow described Gage as "a perfectly healthy, strong and active young man, twenty-five years of age, nervo-bilious temperament, five feet six inches [1.68 m] in height, average weight one hundred and fifty pounds [68 kg], possessing an iron will as well as an iron frame; muscular system unusually well developed—having had scarcely a day's illness from his childhood to the date of [his] injury." 

Gage may have gained skill with explosives on his family's farms or in nearby mines and quarries, and is known to have participated in construction of the Hudson River Railroad in Cortlandt Town, New York; by the time of his accident he was a blasting foreman (possibly an independent contractor) on railway construction projects. His employers considered him "the most efficient and capable foreman in their employ ... a shrewd, smart business man, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation", and he had even commissioned a custom-made tamping iron—a large iron rod—for use in setting charges.

Gage's accident

Line of the Rutland & Burlington Railroad passing through "cut" in rock south of Cavendish. Gage met with his accident while setting explosives to create either this cut or a similar one nearby.​

On September 13, 1848, Gage was directing a work gang blasting rock while preparing the roadbed for the Rutland & Burlington Railroad south of the town of Cavendish, Vermont. Setting a blast involved boring a hole deep into an outcropping of rock; adding blasting powder, a fuse, and sand; then compacting this charge into the hole using the tamping iron. Gage was doing this around 4:30 p.m. when (possibly because the sand was omitted) the iron "struck fire" against the rock and the powder exploded. Rocketing from the hole, the tamping iron‍—‌three feet seven inches (1.1 m) long and 1+1⁄4 inches (3.2 cm) in diameter‍—‌ "entered on the [left] side of [Gage's] face ... passing back of the left eye, and out at the top of the head." 

Despite nineteenth-century references to Gage as "the American Crowbar Case"  his tamping iron did not have the bend or claw sometimes associated with the term crowbar; rather, it was a pointed cylinder something like a javelin, "round and rendered comparatively smooth by use":

The end which entered [Gage's cheek] first is pointed; the taper being [twelve] inches [30 cm] long ... circumstances to which the patient perhaps owes his life. The iron is unlike any other, and was made by a neighbouring blacksmith to please the fancy of its owner.

External videos
Video reconstruction of tamping iron passing through Gage's skull (Ratiu et al. 2004)​

(l) Bigelow's estimate of the iron's path (1850). (r) Ratiu et al. and Van Horn et al. concluded Gage's mouth had been open at the moment of the explosion, and that his skull "hinged" open as the iron passed through.​

Weighing 13+1⁄4 pounds (6.0 kg), this "abrupt and intrusive visitor" was found some 80 feet (25 m) away, "smeared with blood and brain." 

Gage "was thrown upon his back by the explosion, and gave a few convulsive motions of the extremities, but spoke in a few minutes," walked with little assistance, and sat upright in an oxcart for the 3⁄4-mile (1.2 km) ride to town. About thirty minutes after the accident, Dr. Edward H. Williams found him sitting in a chair outside his lodgings:

When I drove up he said, "Doctor, here is business enough for you." I first noticed the wound upon the head before I alighted from my carriage, the pulsations of the brain being very distinct. The top of the head appeared somewhat like an inverted funnel, as if some wedge-shaped body had passed from below upward. Mr. Gage, during the time I was examining this wound, was relating the manner in which he was injured to the bystanders. I did not believe Mr. Gage's statement at that time, but thought he was deceived. Mr. Gage persisted in saying that the bar went through his head. Mr. G. got up and vomited; the effort of vomiting pressed out about half a teacupful of the brain, which fell upon the floor.

Harlow took charge of the case around 6 p.m.:

You will excuse me for remarking here, that the picture presented was, to one unaccustomed to military surgery, truly terrific; but the patient bore his sufferings with the most heroic firmness. He recognized me at once, and said he hoped he was not much hurt. He seemed to be perfectly conscious, but was getting exhausted from the hemorrhage. His person, and the bed on which he was laid, were literally one gore of blood.

Initial treatment

A night­cap (from an 1801 sur­gi­cal manual)

With Williams' assistance Harlow shaved the scalp around the region of the tamping iron's exit, then removed coagulated blood, small bone fragments, and an ounce [30 g] of protruding brain. After probing for foreign bodies and replacing two large detached pieces of bone, Harlow closed the wound with adhesive straps, leaving it partially open for drainage; the entrance wound in the cheek was bandaged only loosely, for the same reason. A wet compress was applied, then a nightcap, then further bandaging to secure these dressings. Harlow also dressed Gage's hands and forearms (which along with his face had been "deeply burned") and ordered that Gage's head remain elevated.

Late that evening Harlow noted: "Mind clear. Constant agitation of his legs, being alternately retracted and extended like the shafts of a fulling mill. Says he 'does not care to see his friends, as he shall be at work in a few days.'" 

Convalescence

The Boston Post for Sep. 21, 1848 (understating the diameter of Gage's tamping iron and overstating damage to his jaw)​

Despite his own optimism, Gage's convalescence was long, difficult, and uneven. Though recognizing his mother and uncle (summoned from Lebanon, thirty miles away) on the first day after the accident, on the second day he "lost control of his mind, and became decidedly delirious". Two days later he was again "rational ... knows his friends", and after a further week of improvement it occurred to Harlow, for the first time, "that it was possible for Gage to recover ... This improvement, however, was of short duration."

Beginning September 25 Gage was semi-comatose, "seldom speaking unless spoken to, and then answering only in monosyllables" and the next day Harlow noted, "Failing strength ... coma deepened; the globe of the left eye became more protuberant, with [granulation tissue] pushing out rapidly from the internal canthus [as well as] from the wounded brain, and coming out at the top of the head." 

By September 27, "The exhalations from the mouth and head [are] horribly fetid. Comatose, but will answer in monosyllables if aroused. Will not take nourishment unless strongly urged. The friends and attendants are in hourly expectancy of his death, and have his coffin and clothes in readiness." Galvanized, Harlow "cut off the [granulation tissue] sprouting out from the top of the brain and filling the opening, and made free application of caustic [i.e. crystalline silver nitrate] to them. With a scalpel I laid open the [frontalis muscle, from the exit wound to the top of the nose] and immediately there were discharged eight ounces [250 ml] of ill-conditioned pus, with blood, and excessively fetid." ("Gage was lucky to encounter Dr. Harlow when he did," wrote Barker. "Few doctors in 1848 would have had the experience with cerebral abscess with which Harlow left [Jefferson Medical College] and which probably saved Gage's life.")

On October 7, Gage "succeeded in raising himself up, and took one step to his chair". One month later he was walking "up and down stairs, and about the house, into the piazza", and while Harlow was absent for a week, Gage was "in the street every day except Sunday", his desire to return to his family in New Hampshire being "uncontrollable by his friends ... got wet feet and a chill." He soon developed a fever, but by mid-November he was "feeling better in every respect ... walking about the house again; says he feels no pain in the head". Harlow's prognosis at this point: Gage "appears to be in a way of recovering, if he can be controlled." 

Subsequent life and travels

Injuries

"Disfigured yet still hand­some". Note ptosis of the left eye and abscess scar on forehead.

By November 25, Gage was strong enough to return to his parents' home in Lebanon, New Hampshire, where by late December he was "riding out, improving both mentally and physically"  and (as recorded in the notes of a physician who spoke to Gage's mother) "abt. February he was able to do a little work abt. ye horses & barn, feedg. ye cattle &c; that as ye time for ploughing came he was able to do half a days work after that & bore it well."

In April 1849 he returned to Cavendish and paid a visit to Harlow, who noted at that time loss of vision (and ptosis) of the left eye, a large scar on the forehead (from Harlow's draining of the abscess) and

upon the top of the head ... a deep depression, two inches by one and one-half inches [5 cm by 4 cm] wide, beneath which the pulsations of the brain can be perceived. Partial paralysis of the left side of the face. His physical health is good, and I am inclined to say he has recovered. Has no pain in head, but says it has a queer feeling which he is not able to describe." 

New England and New York (1849–1852)

In November 1849 Harvard's Professor of Surgery, Henry Jacob Bigelow, brought Gage to Boston "at very considerable expense [and after having] satisfied himself that the bar had actually passed through the man's head", presented him to a meeting of the Boston Society for Medical Improvement and (possibly) to a Harvard Medical School class.

Unable to return to his railroad work (see § Early observations) Gage appeared for a time, with his iron, at Barnum's American Museum in New York City (not the later Barnum's circus—there is no evidence Gage ever exhibited with a troupe or circus, or on a fairground). Advertisements have also been found for public appearances by Gage‍—‌which he may have arranged and promoted himself‍—‌in New Hampshire and Vermont, supporting Harlow's statement that Gage made public appearances in "most of the larger New England towns". (Years later Bigelow wrote that Gage had been "a shrewd and intelligent man and quite disposed to do anything of that sort to turn an honest penny", but had given up such efforts because "[that] sort of thing has not much interest for the general public".)

For about eighteen months he worked for the owner of a livery and coach service in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Chile and California (1852–1858)

In August 1852, Gage was invited to Chile to work as a long-distance stagecoach driver there, "caring for horses, and often driving a coach heavily laden and drawn by six horses" on the Valparaiso–Santiago route. (A visitor wrote that "the departure of the coach was always a great event at Valparaiso—a crowd of ever-astonished Chilenos assembling every day to witness the phenomenon of one man driving six horses.")

In mid-1859, after his health began to fail, he left Chile for San Francisco, where he recovered under the care of his mother and sister, who had relocated there from New Hampshire around the time Gage went to Chile. Then, "anxious to work", he found employment with a farmer in Santa Clara.

Death and subsequent travels

"It is regretted that an autopsy could not have been had, so that the precise condition of the enceph­a­lon at the time of his death might have been known. [Therefore] the mother and friends, waiving the claims of personal and private affection, with a magnanimity more than praise­wor­thy, at my request have cheerful­ly placed this skull ... in my hands, for the benefit of science." Gage's skull (sawn to show interior) and iron, photographed in 1868.​

In February 1860 Gage had several epileptic seizures. He lost his job, and (wrote Harlow) as the seizures increased in frequency and severity over the succeeding three months he "continued to work in various places [though he] could not do much."

On May 18 he "left Santa Clara and went home to his mother. At 5 o'clock, A.M., on the 20th, he had a severe convulsion. The family physician was called in, and bled him. The convulsions were repeated frequently during the succeeding day and night," and he died during status epilepticus, in or near San Francisco, late on May 21, 1860, just under twelve years after his injury. He was buried in San Francisco's Lone Mountain Cemetery. (Though some accounts assert that Gage's iron was buried with him, there is no evidence for this.)

Skull and iron

In 1866, Harlow (who had "lost all trace of [Gage], and had well nigh abandoned all expectation of ever hearing from him again") somehow learned that Gage had died in California, and wrote to his family there. At his request they opened Gage's grave long enough to remove his skull, which the family then personally delivered to Harlow, by then a prominent physician, business man, and civic leader in Woburn, Massachusetts.

About a year after the accident, Gage had given his tamping iron to Harvard Medical School's Warren Anatomical Museum, but he later reclaimed it and made what he called "my iron bar" his "constant companion during the remainder of his life"; now it too was delivered to Harlow. After studying them for a triumphal 1868 retrospective paper on his patient Harlow redeposited the iron—this time with Gage's skull—in the Warren Museum, where they remain on display today. The iron bears the following inscription (though the date it gives for the accident is one day off, and Phinehas is not the way Gage spelled his name):

This is the bar that was shot through the head of M^r Phinehas^[sic] P. Gage at Cavendish, Vermont, Sept. 14,^[sic] 1848. He fully recovered from the injury & deposited this bar in the Museum of the Medical College of Harvard University. Phinehas P. Gage Lebanon Grafton Cy N–H Jan 6 1850.

Much later Gage's headless remains were moved to Cypress Lawn Cemetery as part of a systematic relocation of San Francisco's dead to new resting places outside city limits.

Brain damage and mental changes

The left frontal lobe (red), the forward portion of which was damaged by Gage's injury, per Harlow's digital examination and the digital analyses of Ratiu et al. and Van Horn et al.​

Extent of brain damage

False-color repre­sen­ta­tions of cere­bral fiber path­ways affect­ed, per Van Horn et al.​

Debate about whether the trauma and subsequent infection had damaged both of Gage's frontal lobes, or only the left, began almost immediately after his accident. The 1994 conclusion of Hanna Damasio et al., that damage was bilateral, was drawn not from Gage's skull but from a "Gage-like" one‍—‌a cadaver skull deformed to match the dimensions of Gage's. Using CT scans of Gage's actual skull, Ratiu et al. and Van Horn et al. both rejected that conclusion, agreeing with Harlow's belief (based on probing Gage's wounds with his fingers) that only the left frontal lobe had been damaged.

In addition, Ratiu et al. were the first to note that the hole between the roof of the mouth and the base of the cranium (created as the iron passed through) has a diameter about half that of the iron itself; combining this with the hairline fracture running from behind the exit region down the front of the skull, they concluded that the skull "hinged" open as the iron entered the cranium, then (once the iron had exited at the top) was pulled closed by the resilience of soft tissues.

Van Horn et al. concluded that damage to Gage's white matter (of which they made detailed estimates) was as or more significant to Gage's mental changes than cerebral cortex (gray matter) damage.

First-hand reports of mental changes

Gage certainly displayed some kind of change in behavior after his injury, but the nature, extent, and duration of this change have been difficult to establish. Only a handful of sources give direct information on what Gage was like (either before or after the accident), the mental changes described after his death were much more dramatic than anything reported while he was alive, and few of the sources are explicit about the period of Gage's life to which their various descriptions of him (which vary widely in their implied level of functional impairment) are meant to apply.

Early observations (1849–1852)

Harlow described the pre-accident Gage as hard-working, responsible, and "a great favorite" with the men in his charge, his employers having regarded him as "the most efficient and capable foreman in their employ". But these same employers, after Gage's accident, "considered the change in his mind so marked that they could not give him his place again":

The equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities, seems to have been destroyed. 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. Previous to his injury, although untrained in the schools, he possessed a well-balanced mind, and was looked upon by those who knew him as a shrewd, smart businessman, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation. In this regard his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was "no longer Gage".

"The leading feature of this case is its improbability." Harvard's Henry J. Bigelow in 1854. His training predisposed him to minimize Gage's behavioral changes.​

"I dressed him, God healed him."  Dr. John Martyn Harlow, who attended Gage after the "rude missile had been shot through his brain", and obtained his skull for study after his death, in later life. Harlow's interest in phrenology prepared him to accept that Gage's injury changed his behavior.​

"I have the pleasure of being able to present to you [a case] without parallel in the annals of surgery." Harlow's 1868 presentation to the Massachusetts Medical Society of Gage's skull, iron, and later history.

This description ("now routinely quoted", says Kotowicz) is from Harlow's notes set down soon after the accident, but Harlow—perhaps hesitant to describe his patient negatively while he was still alive—left them unpublished until 1868, after Gage had died and his family had brought him "what we so much desired to see" (as Harlow termed Gage's skull).

In the interim, Harlow's 1848 report, published just as Gage was emerging from his convalescence, only hinted at psychological symptoms:

The mental manifestations of the patient, I leave to a future communication. I think the case ... is exceedingly interesting to the enlightened physiologist and intellectual philosopher.

But after Bigelow (who had kept Gage in Boston for several weeks' observation in late 1849 termed Gage "quite recovered in faculties of body and mind", with only "inconsiderable disturbance of function", a rejoinder in the American Phrenological Journal—

That there was no difference in his mental manifestations after the recovery is not true ... The man was gross, profane, coarse, and vulgar, to such a degree that his society was intolerable to decent people.

—was apparently based on information anonymously supplied by Harlow. Barker explains these contradictory evaluations (only six months apart) by differences in Bigelow's and Harlow's educational backgrounds:

Harlow's interest in phrenology prepared him to accept the change in character as a significant clue to cerebral function which merited publication. Bigelow had [been taught] that damage to the cerebral hemispheres had no intellectual effect, and he was unwilling to consider Gage's deficit significant ... The use of a single case [including Gage's] to prove opposing views on phrenology was not uncommon.

Later observations (1852–1858)

In 1860, an American physician who had known Gage "well" in Chile from mid-1858 to early 1859 reported that Gage remained "engaged in stage driving [and] in the enjoyment of good health, with no impairment whatever of his mental faculties."  Together with the fact that Gage was hired by his employer in advance, in New England, to be part of the new coaching enterprise in Chile, this implies that Gage's most serious mental changes had been temporary, so that the "fitful, irreverent ... capricious and vacillating" Gage described by Harlow (who last saw Gage less than a year after the accident) became, over time, far more functional, and socially far better adapted.

This conclusion is reinforced (writes psychologist Malcolm Macmillan) by the responsibilities and challenges faced by drivers on the stagecoach route worked by Gage in Chile, including the general requirement that drivers "be reliable, resourceful, and possess great endurance. But above all, they had to have the kind of personality that enabled them to get on well with their passengers." A day's work for Gage meant "a 13-hour journey over 100 miles of poor roads, often in times of political instability or frank revolution. All this—in a land to whose language and customs Phineas arrived an utter stranger—militates as much against permanent disinhibition [i.e. an inability to plan and self-regulate] as do the extremely complex sensory-motor and cognitive skills required of a coach driver."

Social recovery

Macmillan hypothesizes that the contrast between Gage's early post-accident behavior and later post-accident behavior represents a social recovery over time, citing people with similar injuries for whom "someone or something gave enough structure to their lives for them to relearn lost social and personal skills":

Phineas' survival and rehabilitation demonstrated a theory of recovery which has influenced the treatment of frontal lobe damage today. In modern treatment, adding structure to tasks by, for example, mentally visualising a written list, is considered a key method in coping with frontal lobe damage.

According to a contemporary account by visitors to Chile, Gage would have had to

rise early in the morning, prepare himself, and groom, feed, and harness the horses; he had to be at the departure point at a specified time, load the luggage, charge the fares and get the passengers settled; and then had to care for the passengers on the journey, unload their luggage at the destination, and look after the horses. The tasks formed a structure that required control of any impulsiveness he may have had.

Enroute (Macmillan continues):

much foresight was required. Drivers had to plan for turns well in advance, and sometimes react quickly to manoeuvre around other coaches, wagons, and birlochos travelling at various speeds ... Adaptation had also to be made to the physical condition of the route: although some sections were well-made, others were dangerously steep and very rough.

Thus Gage's stagecoach work‍—‌"a highly structured environment in which clear sequences of tasks were required [but within which] contingencies requiring foresight and planning arose daily"‍—‌resembles rehabilitation regimens first developed by Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria for the reestablishment of self-regulation in World War II soldiers suffering frontal lobe injuries.

Macmillan adds that if Gage made such a recovery—if he eventually "figured out how to live" (as Fleischman put it) despite his injury—then it "would add to current evidence that rehabilitation can be effective even in difficult and long-standing cases"; and if Gage could achieve such improvement without medical supervision, "what are the limits for those in formal rehabilitation programs?"  As author Sam Kean put it, "If even Phineas Gage bounced back—that's a powerful message of hope." 

Distortion of mental changes

A moral man, Phineas Gage
Tamping powder down holes for his wage
Blew his special-made probe
Through his left frontal lobe
Now he drinks, swears, and flies in a rage.

— Anonymous

Macmillan's analysis of accounts of Gage (scientific and popular) found that they almost always distort and exaggerate his behavioral changes well beyond anything described by anyone who had contact with him. In the words of Barker, "As years passed, the case took on a life of its own, accruing novel additions to Gage's story without any factual basis", and even today (writes historian Zbigniew Kotowicz) "Most commentators still rely on hearsay and accept what others have said about Gage, namely, that after the accident he became a psychopath ..." 

Behaviors ascribed to the post-accident Gage which are either unsupported by, or in contradiction to, the known facts include mistreatment of wife and children (of which Gage had neither); inappropriate sexual behavior, promiscuity, or impaired sexuality; lack of forethought, concern for the future, or capacity for embarassment; parading his self-misery, and vainglory in showing his wounds; inability or refusal to hold a job; irresponsibility and untrustworthiness; aggressiveness and violence; vagrancy and begging; plus drifting, drinking, bragging, lying, brawling, bullying, psychopathy, inability to make ethical decisions, loss of all respect for social conventions, and acting "like an idiot". Macmillan found that none of these behaviors is mentioned by anyone who had met Gage or even his family; as Kotowicz put it, "Harlow does not report a single act that Gage should have been ashamed of." 

For example, several authors misinterpret a passage by Harlow— "'... continued to work in various places;' could not do much, changing often, 'and always finding something that did not suit him in every place he tried'" —as meaning Gage could not hold a regular job after his accident, "was prone to quit in a capricious fit or be let go because of poor discipline", "never returned to a fully independent existence", and died "in careless dissipation". In fact, after his initial post-recovery months spent traveling and exhibiting, Gage supported himself‍—‌at a total of just two jobs‍—‌from early 1851 until just before his death in 1860. In Kotowicz's words, "What Harlow is telling us is clear and unambiguous: Gage returns from South America to his mother to recuperate. As soon as he is fit, he goes back to work with horses, which is what he has been doing for years." (Harlow's "changing often" refers only to Gage's final months, after convulsions had set in, and even then Gage remained "anxious to work".)

Theoretical use, misuse, and nonuse

Phrenologists contended that destruction of the mental "organs" of Veneration and Benevolence (top) caused Gage's behavioral changes.

Though Gage is considered the "index case for personality change due to frontal lobe damage"  his scientific value is undermined by the uncertain extent of his brain damage and the lack of information about his behavioral changes. Instead, Macmillan writes, "Phineas' story is [primarily] worth remembering because it illustrates how easily a small stock of facts becomes transformed into popular and scientific myth," the paucity of evidence having allowed "the fitting of almost any theory [desired] to the small number of facts we have". A similar concern was expressed as far back as 1877, when British neurologist David Ferrier (writing to Harvard's Henry Pickering Bowditch in an attempt "to have this case definitely settled as it is one of more than usual interest in a localisation point of view") complained that

In investigating reports on diseases and injuries of the brain, I am constantly amazed at the inexactitude and distortion to which they are subject by men who have some pet theory to support. The facts suffer so frightfully ...

More recently, neurologist Oliver Sacks refers to the "interpretations and misinterpretations, from 1848 to the present," of Gage.

Thus in the nineteenth-century controversy over whether the various mental functions are, or are not, localized in specific regions of the brain, both sides managed to enlist Gage in support of their theories; for example, soon after Dupuy wrote that Gage proved that the brain is not localized, Ferrier cited Gage as proof that it is. Phrenologists made use of Gage as well, contending that his mental changes resulted from destruction of his "organ of Veneration" and/or the adjacent "organ of Benevolence".

In a more recent example A. Damasio, in support of his somatic marker hypothesis (relating decision-making to emotions and their biological underpinnings), draws parallels between behaviors he attributes to Gage and those of modern patients with damage to the orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala. But A. Damasio's depiction of Gage has been criticized by Kotowicz as "grotesque fabrication ... ['perpetrating'] the myth of Gage the psychopath ... Damasio changes [Harlow's] narrative, omits facts, and adds freely ... It seems that the growing commitment to the frontal lobe doctrine of emotions brought Gage to the limelight and shapes how he is described." As Kihlstrom put it:

[M]any modern commentators exaggerate the extent of Gage's personality change, perhaps engaging in a kind of retrospective reconstruction based on what we now know, or think we do, about the role of the frontal cortex in self-regulation.

Gage's skull on display, Warren Museum

Psychosurgery and lobotomy

It is frequently said that what happened to Gage played a part in the later development of various forms of psychosurgery, particularly lobotomy. Aside from the question of why the unpleasant changes usually (if hyperbolically) attributed to Gage would inspire surgical imitation, there is no such link, according to Macmillan:

There is simply no evidence that any of these operations were deliberately designed to produce the kinds of changes in Gage that were caused by his accident, nor that knowledge of Gage's fate formed part of the rationale for them‍... [W]hat his case did show came solely from his surviving his accident: major operations [such as for tumors] could be performed on the brain without the outcome necessarily being fatal.

Portraits

The second portrait of Gage to be identified (2010)​

Two daguerreotype portraits of Gage, identified in 2009 and 2010, are the only known likenesses of him other than a life mask taken for Bigelow in late 1849 (and now in the Warren Museum along with Gage's skull and iron). The first shows "a disfigured yet still-handsome" Gage with one eye closed and scars clearly visible, "well dressed and confident, even proud"  and holding his iron, on which portions of its inscription can be made out. (For decades the portrait's owners had imagined it showed an injured whaler with his harpoon. )

The second, copies of which were found in the possession of two different branches of the Gage family, shows Gage in a somewhat different pose, wearing a different shirt and different tie, but the same waistcoat and possibly the same jacket.

Authenticity was confirmed in several ways (including photo-overlaying the inscriptions seen in the portraits against that on the actual tamping iron, and matching the subject's injuries to those preserved in the life mask) but about when, where, and by whom they were taken nothing is known, except that they were created no earlier than January 1850 (when the inscription was added to the tamping iron), on two different occasions, and are likely by different photographers.

The portraits reinforce the social recovery hypothesis already described. "That [Gage] was any form of vagrant following his injury is belied by these remarkable images", wrote Van Horn. "Although just one picture," Kean commented in reference to the first image, "it exploded the common image of Gage as a dirty, disheveled misfit. This Phineas was proud, well-dressed, and disarmingly handsome."

See also

• Anatoli Bugorski—scientist through whose head a particle-accelerator proton beam accidentally passed
• Eadweard Muybridge—another early case of head injury leading to mental changes

External links

• Warren Anatomical Museum, Center for the History of Medicine, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine (Harvard Medical School) – Home of Gage's skull and iron.
• Meet Phineas Gage – How the owners of the 2009-identified daguerreotype learned it depicted Gage.
• Phineas Gage roadside memorial, Cavendish, Vermont.