Phineas Gage: The man with a hole in his head
"Phineas Gage had a hole in his head, and ev'ryone knew that he oughta be dead. Was it fate or blind luck, though it never came clear, kept keepin' on year after year…"
That song by banjo man Dan Lindner probably sounds like an outlandish myth, an old wives' tale passed around a small town.
But incredibly, his jaunty tune about Phineas Gage is true.
He did have a hole in his head, and against all the conceivable odds, he should have been dead. But instead, his remarkable story changed the study of neuroscience forever.
But on the 13th September, 1848, this relatively simple procedure took a vicious twist. Phineas' iron rod apparently scraped the side of the rock, creating a spark which set off the gunpowder early.
It sent the iron - about one meter long and three centimetres in diameter - straight up into his skull, driving through just under his left eye, and out of the top of his head, landing some 30 metres away....
Read entire article at BBC
That song by banjo man Dan Lindner probably sounds like an outlandish myth, an old wives' tale passed around a small town.
But incredibly, his jaunty tune about Phineas Gage is true.
He did have a hole in his head, and against all the conceivable odds, he should have been dead. But instead, his remarkable story changed the study of neuroscience forever.
But on the 13th September, 1848, this relatively simple procedure took a vicious twist. Phineas' iron rod apparently scraped the side of the rock, creating a spark which set off the gunpowder early.
It sent the iron - about one meter long and three centimetres in diameter - straight up into his skull, driving through just under his left eye, and out of the top of his head, landing some 30 metres away....