The man with an iron rod through his brain probably recovered.
In 1848 an explosion drove a six-kilogram iron bar clean through Phineas Gage's skull. He survived, and textbooks made him the classic case of a personality destroyed by brain damage. Yet the evidence suggests his worst changes faded: he later spent years driving six-horse stagecoaches in Chile.
On 13 September 1848, Gage, a railway construction foreman in Vermont, was packing explosive powder into a rock with a tamping iron when the charge went off. The iron, more than a metre long and about 6 kilograms, entered below his left cheekbone, passed behind his eye and left through the top of his skull, landing some 25 metres away. Within minutes he was talking, and he sat up in an oxcart for the ride back to town. His doctor, John Martyn Harlow, fought off a severe infection over the following weeks, and Gage lived for another twelve years.
Harlow later wrote that the injury had changed him. The capable, well-liked foreman had become impatient, profane and erratic, so much so that friends said he was 'no longer Gage'. The case fed nineteenth-century arguments about whether different parts of the brain do different jobs, and it is still taught as early evidence that the frontal lobes help shape personality.
The trouble, as the psychologist Malcolm Macmillan has shown, is how little we actually know. Harlow is almost the only first-hand source, and later retellings piled on details that nobody who met Gage ever reported: a brawling drifter, a circus freak, a man who died penniless. In fact he supported himself from 1851 until shortly before his death, including about seven years driving coaches on the Valparaíso–Santiago road, work that demanded planning, reliability and tact with passengers. A doctor who knew him in Chile saw no mental impairment. Two photographs identified in 2009 and 2010 show a well-dressed, confident man holding his iron.
Macmillan argues that Gage made a 'social recovery', helped by the tight daily structure of his job, an idea that echoes modern rehabilitation after frontal-lobe injury. His skull and iron are on display at Harvard's Warren Anatomical Museum. Gage may be most useful as a lesson about stories: a handful of facts can grow into a myth when writers copy each other rather than the original sources.
Source: Wikipedia — Phineas Gage · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
