Temptation by Daniel Akst

Author:Daniel Akst
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2011-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

Ouch!

On September 13, 1848, Phineas Gage was the handsome twenty-five-year-old foreman of a work crew building a section of the bed for the Rutland and Burlington Railroad just south of Cavendish, Vermont, where the crew was methodically blasting its way through a large section of rock that stood in the way. They did this by drilling holes in the stone and filling them with powder and fuse. This material was gently tamped down, then sand was added as a kind of buffer, after which a tamping iron would be brought to bear for more serious packing. This was an iron cylinder 42 inches long and weighing 13½ pounds. For most of its length, it was 1¼ inches wide, but it narrowed to a point of about a quarter inch at one end.

At 4:30 p.m., Gage for some reason—fatigue? distraction?—began using this bar to tamp a charge into a hole without the crucial sand. A spark was triggered by the collision of the metal against the rock, and the resulting explosion propelled the tamping iron like a rocket, straight out of the hole and clear through young Gage’s head.

All things considered, he was extraordinarily lucky. The bar entered, point first, just below his left cheekbone and penetrated the brain behind the socket of his left eye. The force of the missile was such that it exited through the top of his head and landed 20 to 25 yards behind him. Along the way, it knocked out a chunk of his frontal lobes.

The precise nature of Gage’s brain damage will never be known, but an enormous amount of scientific ingenuity has been devoted to trying to figure it out. Unfortunately, no autopsy was performed—but we are getting ahead of ourselves, because, if you can believe it, the tamping-bar accident didn’t kill him.

Gage, apparently an exceedingly robust specimen, may have been unconscious for a while, but sooner or later he was driven by his men in an oxcart to the nearby inn where he lived. He dismounted without any help and from the inn’s porch told his story to those who gathered around. When Dr. Edward Higginson Williams turned up, Gage greeted him by saying, “Doctor, here is business enough for you.”

Gage’s luck held; about an hour later, Dr. John Martyn Harlow arrived, and over the months ahead, this man’s deft handling of Gage’s serious infection—long before the invention of antibiotics—saved the patient’s life. It’s also thanks to Harlow, mainly, that we know of the psychological consequences following Gage’s unfortunate encounter with the tamping rod.

Preceding the accident, according to Harlow, Gage was quite a guy: efficient, energetic, capable, temperate in his habits, of “a well-balanced mind,” and a favorite of his men and his employer alike. Afterward, however, he was almost literally a different person; Harlow tells us he became obstinate, profane, capricious, “impatient of restraint or advice” that happened to go against his own desires, and “a child intellectually” with “the animal passions of a strong man.” The change was so complete that, according to those who knew him, he was “no longer Gage.

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