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Experiences: A Case Study Of Phineas Gage's Life

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Phineas Gage Case Study

“Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and grieves which we endure help us in our marching onward (Henry Ford).” Experiences are meant to build character, improve insight, and broaden one’s knowledge. Throughout a person’s life they will have a variety of experiences and life changing moments, but none like Phineas Gage. Phineas Gage was a 25-year-old foreman for a railroad construction crew that helped with the building of the Rutland and Burlington railroad track. “On 13 September… he poured blasting powder into a borehole and forgot to add sand… [h]e then tamped it down with a… iron tamping bar… [t]he bar shot straight out of the borehole, penetrated the left cheek passing upward, took out his eye and passed through the top of his head before landing 80 feet away, covered in blood (Guidotti, 2012).” At this point in time, his men rush to his side …show more content…

His family feared the worst, but he came through fine. After, Phineas had lived a normal life. He had full possession of reason, however his family saw changes in him. “His contractors, who regarded him as the most efficient and capable foreman in their employ previous to his injury, considered the change in his mind so marked that they could not give him his place again. In this regard, his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was “no longer Gage (Costandi, 2006).” This change in personality is understandable due to the fact that the tamping rod incident basically resembled a frontal lobotomy. It removed numerous frontal and parietal bone connections and frontal cortex connections. The breaking of these lobe connections caused the spike in his attitude towards life and his

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Then that untrue idea, or the untrue perception, grows and dwells until it becomes the honest truth in a person’s mind. Meaning that the mind can distort things and make something seem larger than it actually is, Gene quotes, “It was as though football players were really bent on crushing the life out of each other, as though boxers were in combat to the death, as though even a tennis ball might turn into a bullet.”. Gene also finds many reasons to support why he thinks of Phineas as a threat. “Phineas in those days almost always moved in groups the size of hockey teams”, as Gene said in the novel tells the reader that Phineas was very popular and many people liked to be around him. Gene has also spoken of many trophies and plaques with Phineas’s name on it that exemplified his great athletic abilities.

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