Mick Hartley

Practically every book on brain function will mention the man: he's the undeclared patron saint of neurology. Antonio Damasio called the case of Phineas Gage "the historical beginnings of the study of the biological basis of behavior". The foreman of a railroad construction gang, in 1848 a mistimed blast sent a large iron rod clean through his head. Incredibly he survived, though colleagues claimed he was a changed man, given to bursts of profanity where previously he'd been a model citizen. The case gave weight to the notion of the modular brain, with the frontal lobes – destroyed in Gage's case – the centre of inhibition. 

This old daguerrotype had been in the collection of Jack and Beverly Wilgus for 30 years:

They'd assumed it showed an old whaling captain holding a harpoon. In 2007 they posted it on Flickr with the caption "Daguerreotype – One Eyed Man with Harpoon". Whaling experts were doubtful. Then in December 2008 someone posted a comment "maybe you found a photo of Phineas Gage? If so, it would be the only one known." 

And so it proved. That's no harpoon – that's the iron bar that founded the science of neurology, clutched proudly by Phineas Gage himself.

Time…has not been kind to old Phineas, his skull peering from behind glass at Harvard’s medical school. Modern writers have imagined him as mangled and morose, a once-reliable Vermont laborer transformed by the grotesqueness of his injuries into a profanity-spewing stranger.

But a photo made widely public last week – believed to be the only known image of Gage – casts the legend in a distinctly different light. It depicts Gage – holding the tamping iron that rocketed through his skull – as a man assured, maybe even rakish. He appears strikingly handsome, almost contemporary, with a stylish haircut that falls neatly above the ears.

Only his left eye, closed and slightly protruding, and a snaking scar on his forehead betray the trauma perpetrated by the tamping iron.

Still, as with all things Gage, the photo, published in the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, also deepens the mystique that enshrouds the man.

“He’s a medical miracle. When you see the real tamping iron alongside the skull, it beggars belief that anyone could have survived,’’ declared Malcolm Macmillan, the Australian psychologist who wrote an authoritative examination of Gage.

[Via Metafilter]