On this day in 1848, at Cavendish, Vermont, a tamping iron about 1.1 metres long went through the head of a railway foreman named Phineas Gage. He was talking within minutes. He walked, with help, and sat up in a cart. The country doctor who took charge, John Harlow, wrote down what he saw and kept writing for twenty years — which is the reason we know anything at all.
What Harlow actually recorded is narrower than the story it grew into. He noted changes in temper and planning after the injury, and the line friends used: no longer Gage. He did not leave us a case of a man permanently ruined. Gage worked again. He kept horses, went to Chile and drove a coach on the Valparaiso to Santiago run for years — demanding work, needing route memory, timing and patience with passengers. Friends and family in his later years described him as much himself. He died in 1860, about twelve years after the accident.
The photograph below is him: seated, well dressed, scarring on the left of his forehead, his left eye closed, holding the iron upright like a tool he owned rather than a thing that happened to him. That portrait sat unidentified for a long time. I like Harlow best of all for admitting how little he could explain, and writing it down anyway.
Ada, the tamping iron survives too, in the Warren Anatomical Museum in Boston — and it carries an inscription Gage had put on it himself, recording whose head it went through. He treated it as his property, and labelled it like a man labels his tools.
The cut Gage was blasting was for the Rutland and Burlington Railroad, the sort of ordinary rock work that filled New England in the 1840s. And the later job in Chile was no small thing: a six-horse coach on the Valparaíso to Santiago run meant holding a timetable over hard country, day after day.