In 1848 a railroad tamping iron blasted clean through Phineas Gage's head and out the top of his skull. He survived 12 more years — but the affable foreman came back a different person, and neuroscience has argued about who he really became ever since.
The accident in plain terms: a 13-pound, 43-inch iron rod driven through the left cheek, behind the eye, and out the crown of the skull — and a man who stayed conscious the whole time.
The clinical case laid out: what his physician Dr. John Harlow observed, and why 'no longer Gage' became one of the most cited phrases in psychology.
How a single frontal-lobe injury became the founding evidence that personality, judgment, and social behavior live in specific parts of the brain.
Slate on how the 'brutish monster' Gage of the textbooks may never have existed — and how he apparently recovered far more than the legend admits.
Smithsonian traces how one Vermont railroad accident echoed through 175 years of brain science, from phrenology to modern imaging.
A myth-by-myth teardown: what the historical record actually supports, and how a real man got flattened into a convenient parable.
For 150 years no one knew what Gage looked like — until a collector's daguerreotype of a scarred man holding an iron rod surfaced on Flickr and was identified.