The equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities, seems to have been destroyed. John Martin, followed Gage's progress with interest and documented the personality change: The doctor who treated him initially, Dr. Post-accident Gage was a shadow of his former self. Gage had been a hard worker, an intelligent foreman and a pleasant person. Though Gage lived through the accident, his personality showed damage long after the physical healing was finished. Yes, he even had a sense of humor about it all.īut, not for long. His workmen carted him to the town doctor, to whom he supposedly said, 'Here's work enough for you, doctor.' Gage not only lived, but was walking and speaking right after the accident. He's famous because he lived even though part of his frontal lobe exited along with the tamping iron. Gage is famous not because he had a tamping iron blown through his head. It entered below his left eye socket and exited through the top of his head.

But the sand wasn't there, and when Gage struck the gunpowder it ignited, sending his tamping iron through his skull. A hole had been bored into the rock, the powder had gone in, and (Gage thought) so had the sand that his tamping iron packs. He used a tamping iron - a metal rod three feet long - to tamp charges down before igniting them. Phineas Gage was a railroad worker whose job involved setting blasts to make way through rock for the new lines. We're mapping our brains and using the technology at our fingertips to make strides, but one of the larger steps toward knowing more about our brains came in 1848. Our understanding of the rest of our bodies is pretty thorough, but the organ that makes us US, that commands our speech and movement, our personalities and intelligence we're still drawing a pretty big blank on. in the case of A Madness So Discreet, a story about someone's front lobe being punctured by a tamping iron. A random question, or an overheard conversation in a coffee shop. Something we see from the corner of our eye. Authors never know what's going to lead to a novel.

A Madness So Discreet by Mindy McGinnis