Phineas Gage. · published 2 September 2026
Phineas Gage’s “no longer Gage” description is a snapshot from soon after his 1848 accident, while the best-documented part of his later life is years spent driving stagecoaches in Chile — a job demanding timekeeping, money handling and control of horse teams — which means the case is far better evidence for recovery than for permanent ruin.
These are the working notes, unedited. Everything the video
states as fact comes from here, and nothing else may be stated as fact.
The sections on limits and on what the finding does not show are
part of the brief, not an afterthought — see
the method.
On 13 September 1848, near Cavendish, Vermont, a railroad construction foreman named Phineas Gage was using a tamping iron to pack blasting powder when it detonated. The iron — over a metre long and a little over three centimetres across — was driven up through his left cheek, behind his eye and out through the top of his skull, destroying much of his left frontal lobe.
He survived. He was conscious and speaking within minutes, was treated by Dr John Martyn Harlow, and lived a further twelve years, dying in 1860 after a series of seizures.
The popular version: the accident destroyed his personality. He became foul-mouthed, unreliable and unemployable, and stayed that way. Harlow’s phrase, that his friends found him “no longer Gage”, is the line every textbook uses. It is the founding case for the idea that the frontal lobes hold personality.
What the retelling leaves out
The “no longer Gage” description comes from Harlow’s 1868 account and describes the period not long after the injury. It is a snapshot, not a verdict on the rest of his life.
Malcolm Macmillan assembled what is actually documented in An Odd Kind of Fame (2000) and, with Matthew Lena, in “Rehabilitating Phineas Gage” (2010). Gage went on to work for several years as a long-distance stagecoach driver in Valparaíso, Chile — a job requiring routine, timekeeping, the handling of money, passengers and teams of horses over difficult roads. Whatever happened to him immediately after the accident, that is not the life of a man who could no longer function.
Macmillan also surveyed how the case is taught and found that a great deal of the vivid detail has no source in any primary account, and that textbook versions contradict each other freely. Specific claims about his behaviour should not be repeated unless Harlow actually recorded them.
The extent of the brain damage is itself uncertain. Reconstructions from the skull by Damasio and colleagues (1994), Ratiu (2004) and Van Horn (2012) do not agree with one another.