Phineas gage

Jack and Beverly Wilgus have had this daguerreotype for 30 years. They assumed it was a whaler holding the harpoon that blinded him. But someone who saw the image recently…

It took 13 pounds of iron and an explosion to bring the world to the modern era of neuroscience. Thanks to Phineas Gage, a railroad worker who survived a terrible brain injury at work in 1848. While the doctors and his friends expected him to die, Gage still became able to speak, work, and

In 1848, a railroad worker survived an accident that drove a 13-pound iron bar through his head. The injury changed his personality, and our understanding of the brain.

Self-Portrait as Phineas Gage #illustration #art

Phineas Gage (The american crowbar case, 1823-1860)

The story of Phineas Gage, a man who had a large iron rod shoot through his head and then lived to tell the tale. Unlikely and unbelievable!

Phineas Gage

Illustration of Phineas Gage's head and brain wounds. An iron rod is lodged from his frontal lobe, passes behind his left eye, and out through the left cheek.

The story of Phineas Gage illustrates some of the first medical knowledge gained on the relationship between personality and the functioning of the brain's frontal lobe. A well-liked and successful construction foreman, Phineas Gage was contracted to work on the bed preparation for the Rutland & Burlington Railroad in Cavendish, Vermont in late 1840’s. On the 13th of September 1848, while preparing the railroad bed, an accidental explosion of a charge he had set blew a 13-pound tamping iron…