Harlow first described Gage’s case in a medical journal shortly after the accident. According to Harlow, Gage was a hardworking and sensible supervisor at the railroad before the accident. But after he recovered, his employers thought he had changed so much that they couldn’t give him his job back. Gage was now quick to anger and refused to follow directions. And anyone who upset him was subjected to a string of swear words. This begged an important question. Can damage to the brain actually change the way someone acts?
The question became a subject of fierce debate in the scientific community. Some doctors argued that Gage’s changes were not the result of the accident. Or that he had always been that way, and the extra scrutiny was the only reason anyone noticed. Today, we know that the damage to Gage’s brain could have affected the way his nervous system made connections, changing his personality. But at a time when the brain was less understood, the idea that someone’s entire personality, perhaps even essentially their “soul,” could be changed physically was considered by many to be deeply disturbing.
But while there’s little doubt that Gage changed after his accident, the good news for Gage was that the change doesn’t seem to have been permanent. After losing his job at the railroad, Gage was hired by a company to drive stagecoaches in Chile. The fact that Gage was able to do the job suggests that his injuries had no impact on his ability to handle complex tasks, like driving a team of horses. And according to people who met Gage in Chile, he seems to have more or less gone back to being the man he was before the accident.
It’s hard to say now if Gage’s brain had changed, or if he had just managed to learn to live in polite society again. But either way, living in Chile was ultimately not a good experience for Gage. His health began to fail, and he returned to New Hampshire in poor shape. He soon recovered enough to find work as a farmhand in California, but there he began to suffer from bouts of epilepsy. One night in 1860, Gage fell into a seizure that lasted on and off for several days. He finally died on May 21, 1860. A few years later, Harlow heard what had happened to his most famous patient and wrote to Gage’s family.
He asked that Gage’s skull be exhumed so that it could be studied. Gage’s family agreed and sent him the skull, along with the tamping rod that Gage had carried for years as a keepsake. His skull remains today in a museum in Boston. Gage’s case also remains as a valuable research tool for scientists. It’s a real-life example of how damage to the frontal lobe can change someone’s personality. And the best-known photo of Gage, discovered in 2010, serves as a powerful example of how people can survive life-changing injuries. It shows Gage, holding his tamping iron, proud and strong in spite of everything. And in many ways, it changes Gage’s story from a medical oddity to one of hope.
Where did we find this stuff? Here are our sources:
“Why Brain Scientists Are Still Obsessed With The Curious Case Of Phineas Gage”. Jon Hamilton, NPR. May 2017.
“Phineas Gage: Neuroscience’s Most Famous Patient”. Steve Twomey, Smithsonian Magazine. January 2010.
“The Phineas Gage Story”. The University of Akron.