Phineas Gage: Neuroscience's Most Famous Patient

An accident with a tamping iron made Phineas Gage history's most famous brain-injury survivor

  • By Steve Twomey
  • Smithsonian magazine, January 2010, Subscribe
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Phineas Gage
"Here is business enough for you," Gage told the first doctor to treat him after a premature detonation on a railroad-building site turned a tamping iron into a missile. (From the collection of Jack and Beverly Wilgus (Image laterally reversed to show the features in the correct position since daguerreotype is a mirror image))

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Phineas Gage life mask and skull

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Jack and Beverly Wilgus, collectors of vintage photographs, no longer recall how they came by the 19th-century daguerreotype of a disfigured yet still-handsome man. It was at least 30 years ago. The photograph offered no clues as to where or precisely when it had been taken, who the man was or why he was holding a tapered rod. But the Wilguses speculated that the rod might be a harpoon, and the man’s closed eye and scarred brow the result of an encounter with a whale.

So over the years, as the picture rested in a display case in the couple’s Baltimore home, they thought of the man in the daguerreotype as the battered whaler.

In December 2007, Beverly posted a scan of the image on Flickr, the photo-sharing Web site, and titled it “One-Eyed Man with Harpoon.” Soon, a whaling enthusiast e-mailed her a dissent: that is no harpoon, which suggested that the man was no whaler. Months later, another correspondent told her that the man might be Phineas Gage and, if so, this would be the first known image of him.

Beverly, who had never heard of Gage, went online and found an astonishing tale.

In 1848, Gage, 25, was the foreman of a crew cutting a railroad bed in Cavendish, Vermont. On September 13, as he was using a tamping iron to pack explosive powder into a hole, the powder detonated. The tamping iron—43 inches long, 1.25 inches in diameter and weighing 13.25 pounds—shot skyward, penetrated Gage’s left cheek, ripped into his brain and exited through his skull, landing several dozen feet away. Though blinded in his left eye, he might not even have lost consciousness, and he remained savvy enough to tell a doctor that day, “Here is business enough for you.”

Gage’s initial survival would have ensured him a measure of celebrity, but his name was etched into history by observations made by John Martyn Harlow, the doctor who treated him for a few months afterward. Gage’s friends found him“no longer Gage,” Harlow wrote. The balance between his “intellectual faculties and animal propensities” seemed gone. He could not stick to plans, uttered “the grossest profanity” and showed “little deference for his fellows.” The railroad-construction company that employed him, which had thought him a model foreman, refused to take him back. So Gage went to work at a stable in New Hampshire, drove coaches in Chile and eventually joined relatives in San Francisco, where he died in May 1860, at age 36, after a series of seizures.

In time, Gage became the most famous patient in the annals of neuroscience, because his case was the first to suggest a link between brain trauma and personality change. In his book An Odd Kind of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage, the University of Melbourne’s Malcolm Macmillan writes that two-thirds of introductory psychology textbooks mention Gage. Even today, his skull, the tamping iron and a mask of his face made while he was alive are the most sought-out items at the Warren Anatomical Museum on the Harvard Medical School campus.

Michael Spurlock, a database administrator in Missoula, Montana, happened upon the Wilgus daguerreotype on Flickr in December 2008. 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. He knew enough, too, to be intrigued by Gage’s appearance, if it was Gage. Over the years, accounts of his changed character had gone far beyond Harlow’s observations, Macmillan says, turning him into an ill-tempered, shiftless drunk. But the man in the Flickr photogragh seemed well-dressed and confident.


Jack and Beverly Wilgus, collectors of vintage photographs, no longer recall how they came by the 19th-century daguerreotype of a disfigured yet still-handsome man. It was at least 30 years ago. The photograph offered no clues as to where or precisely when it had been taken, who the man was or why he was holding a tapered rod. But the Wilguses speculated that the rod might be a harpoon, and the man’s closed eye and scarred brow the result of an encounter with a whale.

So over the years, as the picture rested in a display case in the couple’s Baltimore home, they thought of the man in the daguerreotype as the battered whaler.

In December 2007, Beverly posted a scan of the image on Flickr, the photo-sharing Web site, and titled it “One-Eyed Man with Harpoon.” Soon, a whaling enthusiast e-mailed her a dissent: that is no harpoon, which suggested that the man was no whaler. Months later, another correspondent told her that the man might be Phineas Gage and, if so, this would be the first known image of him.

Beverly, who had never heard of Gage, went online and found an astonishing tale.

In 1848, Gage, 25, was the foreman of a crew cutting a railroad bed in Cavendish, Vermont. On September 13, as he was using a tamping iron to pack explosive powder into a hole, the powder detonated. The tamping iron—43 inches long, 1.25 inches in diameter and weighing 13.25 pounds—shot skyward, penetrated Gage’s left cheek, ripped into his brain and exited through his skull, landing several dozen feet away. Though blinded in his left eye, he might not even have lost consciousness, and he remained savvy enough to tell a doctor that day, “Here is business enough for you.”

Gage’s initial survival would have ensured him a measure of celebrity, but his name was etched into history by observations made by John Martyn Harlow, the doctor who treated him for a few months afterward. Gage’s friends found him“no longer Gage,” Harlow wrote. The balance between his “intellectual faculties and animal propensities” seemed gone. He could not stick to plans, uttered “the grossest profanity” and showed “little deference for his fellows.” The railroad-construction company that employed him, which had thought him a model foreman, refused to take him back. So Gage went to work at a stable in New Hampshire, drove coaches in Chile and eventually joined relatives in San Francisco, where he died in May 1860, at age 36, after a series of seizures.

In time, Gage became the most famous patient in the annals of neuroscience, because his case was the first to suggest a link between brain trauma and personality change. In his book An Odd Kind of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage, the University of Melbourne’s Malcolm Macmillan writes that two-thirds of introductory psychology textbooks mention Gage. Even today, his skull, the tamping iron and a mask of his face made while he was alive are the most sought-out items at the Warren Anatomical Museum on the Harvard Medical School campus.

Michael Spurlock, a database administrator in Missoula, Montana, happened upon the Wilgus daguerreotype on Flickr in December 2008. 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. He knew enough, too, to be intrigued by Gage’s appearance, if it was Gage. Over the years, accounts of his changed character had gone far beyond Harlow’s observations, Macmillan says, turning him into an ill-tempered, shiftless drunk. 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. Eventually it reached Jack Eckert, the public-services librarian at Harvard’s Center for the History of Medicine. “Such a ‘wow’ moment,” Eckert recalls. It had to be Gage, he determined. How many mid-19th-century men with a mangled eye and scarred forehead had their portrait taken holding a metal tool? A tool with an inscription on it?

The Wilguses had never noticed the inscription; after all, the daguerreotype measures only 2.75 inches by 3.25 inches. But a few days after receiving Spurlock’s tip, Jack, a retired photography professor, was focusing a camera to take a picture of his photograph. “There’s writing on that rod!” Jack said. He couldn’t read it all, but part of it seemed to say, “through the head of Mr. Phi...”

In March 2009, Jack and Beverly went to Harvard to compare their picture with Gage’s mask and the tamping iron, which had been inscribed in Gage’s lifetime: “This is the bar that was shot through the head of Mr. Phinehas P. Gage,” it reads, misspelling the name.

Harvard has not officially declared that the daguerreotype is of Gage, but Macmillan, whom the Wilguses contacted next, is quite certain. He has also learned of another photograph, he says, kept by a descendant of Gage’s.

As for Spurlock, when he got word that his hunch was apparently correct, “I threw open the hallway door and told my wife, ‘I played a part in a historical discovery!’ ”

Steve Twomey is based in New Jersey. He wrote about map and document thieves for the April 2008 issue of Smithsonian.


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Comments (21)

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Wow!! Phineas Gage survived a brain injury. Did you guys know that when you have an open brain injury, the staph and strep bacteria can get it there and create an infection. When the immune system kicks up, it tries to fight off the bacteria, but while it's doing that, the bacteria spiils out toxic bacteria that can infect it, worse than you can imagine it. Your brain is the size of half of a large walnut. :)

Posted by Jessica on May 12,2013 | 07:36 PM

A similar case ocourred last 08/16/2012 in Brazil. See the news here: http://g1.globo.com/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2012/08/operario-com-vergalhao-no-cranio-e-internado-em-cti-de-hospital-do-rio.html

Posted by Levi de Paula Tavares on August 25,2012 | 12:52 PM

Hi, I'm Cameron from BRMS. This passage i've just read was very interesting. Thank you this helps my paper.

Posted by Cameron Alex Smith on February 28,2012 | 09:41 PM

This story shows that the presant ideas of fine-grained,ocult personality changesdetermined by minute vatiations in brain damage have not been created from whole cloth.indeed Gage's brain was damaged in a certain way( viz, the way it was) and he did suffer a change in personality, but even at the time( as the story discloses) the nature of the change and the correlation with the details of the damage was exagerated.

Posted by Joe Fisher on June 22,2011 | 04:45 PM

omg ican't believe this is real. this tragic accident has me really engaged in this story. this is good to teach to aa science class if any one is studying neurological science or learning it shoul read this!

Posted by KM on June 15,2011 | 08:15 PM

To: Smithsonian Magazine Editors,

From: Mark D. Mooney - mooneymd@yahoo.com
Granada Hills, CA 91344

Hello.
I have been following the story of Phineas Gage and his tragic accident with great interest. In the March (letters) issue there was more interest about Phineas and the photographs. Back in the early 1960’s my Dad subscribed to both ‘True’ and ‘Argosy’ magazines and as I read about everything I could get my hands on. I read them cover to cover and seeing how I was a fan of the pulp genre anyway I found those magazines would really take me away.
There was a fascinating story in one of them about Phineas Gage. He was working for a railroad, drilling holes and setting off explosives, (black power). In tamping down some in a bore-hole with a steel star drill. It struck off the explosive black powder and drove the star drill through his skull. Somehow he survived the driving of a steel rod through his head. It went though the frontal lobes of his brain and gave him the equivalent of a frontal lobotomy. They went on in the article about his personality changing but they, at the time, didn’t know what had changed about him, other than him getting a steel rod driven through his skull.
Let m know if you uncover any more on this fascinating story of struggle and survival.
Sincerely, Mark D. Mooney

Posted by Mark D. Mooney on February 23,2010 | 06:26 PM

Prof. Macmillan and I were thrilled to learn that a distant relative of Phineas Gage, reading Mr. Twomey's story (above) in January's Smithsonian, wrote to the magazine with the news that she too has a portrait of Phineas. The second portrait is discussed in the March "Letters" section

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Letters-201003.html

and the new portrait itself may be seen at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage

Posted by Matthew L Lena (Boston) on February 19,2010 | 10:34 AM

"Your web-site states the information, but thought those of your subscribing public without computers would enjoy this information to "Find Phineas" as well !"

That was one of the funniest things I've read in a long time. Thank you, Mr. Skuba.

Posted by M Carrol on January 24,2010 | 01:06 PM

Uncovered a portrait of the younger Phineas Gage?
It's on you to decide if the picture on this site may be attributed to the younger Phineas Gage. Please consult
http://www.people.lu.unisi.ch/casagrar/Phineas_Gage.html

Posted by Roberto Casagrande on January 18,2010 | 11:15 AM

can you tell me the summary of this article

Posted by THALIA on January 16,2010 | 01:45 PM

Mr. Duddy: It's always nice to have independent mutually-reinforcing sources of confirmation, and Sherlock Holmes (who comments on the distinctiveness of ears in "The Cardboard Box") would be mightily pleased by your observation.

But the near-certainty that the the Wilgus daguerreotype really does depict Phineas Gage can be established via less exotic considerations. First, we have the writing on the tamping iron seen in the photo, which matches exactly the writing seen on the iron itself (preserved in the Harvard Medical School's Warren Anatomical Museum).

"But," the doubter may say, "this doesn't rule out this being some 19th-century Harvard student who borrowed the tamping iron for an elaborate photographic prank." Well then, consider also the scars and other disfigurements seen in the image, which even on minute examination (daguerreotypes being renowned for their exquisitely fine detail) precisely correspond to the injuries preserved in a ca.-1850 life mask of Gage (also in the Warren) -- *that* would be have been very hard to fake.

Posted by Matthew L. Lena (Boston) on January 13,2010 | 12:37 PM

There is no doubt that the photo is of Gage. Compare his left ear in his photo with the left ear in the photo of the life mask. They are identical.
Since the shape of a person's ears are as unique as fingerprints, this is proof that the photo is indeed that of Gage.

Posted by Thomas Duddy on January 9,2010 | 12:25 PM

I write in response to the comments about the reversed image of Phineas Gage in the article and web site. As stated in the caption that runs up the right side of the published image and is under the internet image, this daguerreotype(like most daguerreotypes)is a mirror image that is laterally reversed. We have chosen to flip the published image to show Gage's features as they actually appeared. When we were researching the identity of the subject we found that we had to first explain that it was the left and not right eye that was closed because the daguerreotype was a mirror image.

Posted by Beverly Wilgus on December 27,2009 | 11:56 AM

As an ocularist; I was very interested in reading the article about Phineas Gage- for it showcased a monocular individual. For additional information about eye loss during the American Civil War years (mostly through photograph images of the time) viewers can read the article: Eye Injuries and Prosthetic Restoration during the American Civil War Years at www.artificialeyeclinic.com. The article was published in the Journal of Ophthalmic Prosthetics- the Journal for the American Society of Ocularists.

Any reader with additional information regarding eye loss (especially vintage images!) would find a welcome audience here!

Interesting article!

Michael Hughes

Posted by Michael Hughes on December 26,2009 | 07:14 AM



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