September 13, 1848. It’s a hot day at the railroad that’s about to change the course of history forever. Phineas Gage is “working on the railroad, all the live long day” when something goes wrong, and suddenly his thirteen-and-a-half-pound tamping iron shoots through his head. Phineas is very lucky to be alive, but this accident obviously causes some permanent damage to him, and more specifically, to his brain. This incident eventually kills him, but it takes eleven trial-filled years to do so. Some of the main issues Phineas deals with after the accident are never fully physically recovering, changes in personality, and having friends abandon him because of said changes. As a matter of fact, Phineas legitimately had a hole in his head for 11 years. There was a clearly visible section of his skull that never grew back after being blasted to bits. This not only was a problem itself, but also may have been influential in other complications later in his life. In addition to this, Phineas had lost vision in his left eye, and it drooped shut. Not only that, Phineas started to have seizures. Epileptic seizures. An epileptic seizure is where the brain has an electrical storm, sending a person’s muscles into involuntary convulsions. That is what eventually killed Phineas. But why did he have seizures? Because a pole was shot through his head, …show more content…
After coming back to the railroad for only a few days, they fired him and concluded that, “Gage was no longer Gage.” This pattern of getting fired and switching jobs continued for the rest of Phineas’ life. It seemed he just couldn’t get along with adults. (Sounds like the teenagers of our day.) Who could he turn to when all his friends left? How about the thing that was probably the reason they left in the first place, the cause of his brain injury...the tamping iron. In the absence of social activity, Phineas’ “best friend” was a hunk of