Phineas Gage: Neuroscience'S Most Famous Patient

Phineas Gage was born in Grafton County, New Hampshire in which he was the eldest of five siblings. Gage was considered to be a fairly average person in terms of physical attributes such as height and weight, who was strong willed but unusually he was quite muscular for a man at the time. This has been attributed to the belief that Gage worked in mines and quarries in his youth. His employers held Gage in high regard due to his efficiency, capability and his energy.

By the time Gage was 25 he was working as a foreman in which he led a crew in cutting railroad in Vermont. However on September 13 Gage was using a tamping iron to put explosive powder into a hole when the powder ignited and exploded causing the tamping iron to fly into Gage’s left cheek through his brain and exit through the back of his skull. Luckily Gage managed to survive and it is also thought that Gage never even lost consciousness through the ordeal. Although he survived the accident his friends said Gage’s personality had completely changed as now he could no longer stick to plans, would often use profanity and was now rude and showed no respect. This led to his employer’s to refuse to allow him to continue working with them. Gage’s accident led to one of the first observations and links of injuries to the brain to changes in a person’s personality. As the tamping iron pierced through Gage’s frontal cortex this conveyed to neurologists at the time that the frontal cortex was involved with behaviour and personality such as David Ferrier who was a neurologist who did research into cerebral function in which he experimented on primates in order to reveal how they function when a part of their brain is damaged. He observed that damage to the frontal cortex altered the personalities and behaviour of the primates buy their physical characteristics to remain the same. Ferrier then used Gage’s accident as a case study in order to provide evidence for his theory that the frontal cortex was involved in the behaviour and personality of a being.

Little is known about what Gage did after this but it is known that Gage had then worked as a coach driver until 1859 when his health began to deteriorate leading to his death in 1860 from seizures related to his previous injury. Gage was initially buried but then in 1867 he was exhumed so his skull could be examines. A team from UCLA managed to use the skull in order to create a model to be able to simulate the tamping iron going through Gage’s skull which led to the team discovering that 11% of the wide matter in the frontal love was destroyed along with 4% of the cerebral cortex. Additionally the model showed that the connections between the cortex and the limbic system were damaged which would explain the sharp change in Gage’s behaviour. The accident and consequent behavioural changes piqued the interest of many neurologists at the time encouraging them to research more about the brain and its functions.