Say Hello to Phineas Gage

Photograph collectors in Maryland have apparently found what is now the only known photograph of Phineas Gage — the most famous patient in neuroscience history.

Gage, in short (here’s the Wiki), was a railroad worker who had a spike driven clear through his head. He lived, for 11 more years; but his personality was so changed that his friends considered him “no longer Gage.”

The case stunned the scientific world and changed 19th-century thinking about the localization of brain functions.

Here’s BPS Research Digest on the discovery of the photo:

Jack and Beverly Wilgus have had the photograph – known as a daguerreotype after the Parisian photographic pioneer Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre – in their possession for over thirty years, but have only just confirmed its identity.

The photograph shows Gage as a scarred, handsome, proud man, smartly dressed, with one eye closed, wielding the tamping iron that made him famous. Jack and Beverly Wilgus originally thought the image was of a whaler, but after posting the picture on Flick-r, they soon learned from expert whaling commenters that this was not the case (it was not a harpoon that he was holding), and they followed up on an alternative suggestion that perhaps the image was of Gage.

By carefully comparing the photograph with a life mask taken of Gage’s head when he was alive, and the actual tamping iron, both of which are at the Warren Anatomical Museum, the Wilgus’s confirmed that the photo is indeed of Gage. For example, an inscription on the real-life tamping iron is visible in the photograph, and scars visible on Gage’s life mask perfectly match up with the scars shown in the photograph.

The photo is sure to renew the debate over how and why the injury affected Gage’s behavior. One theory, that the accident left him so disfigured that his personality changed, seems a bit less credible. An article is forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Neurosciences.