The Only Living Man With A Hole in His Head

In 1848, building a railroad was a backbreaking, tedious job. Phineas Gage, a foreman on Vermont's Rutland and Burlington Railroad, knows this all to well. One autumn day, while setting a charge to blast rock, something goes horribly wrong. Phineas's tamping iron, used to set charges – 3'7” long and weighing 13 pounds - is propelled through his left cheekbone, through the front of his brain and out through the middle of his forehead, taking a chunk of brain with it. Incredibly, Phineas remains conscious and able to talk. Treated by Dr. John Harlow, it is touch and go for a few weeks, but Phineas appears to make a full recovery. Phineas goes back to work, but, as his workers say, “Gage is no longer Gage.” Instead of the level-headed, dependable and well liked man he was, Phineas now appears short tempered, vulgar and has trouble getting along with other people. Dr. Harlow's peers mock him whenhe presents his findings on the case. Phineas will get fired from the railroad and become a lost soul. He leaves Vermont and will spend time working as a “side-show” freak in Barnum's American Museum, billed as “The Only Living Man With A Hole in His Head”, and then as a stage coach driver in South America, never quite fitting in and always keeping his tamping iron as his constant companion. In 1860, after experiencing increasingly bad seizures, caused by his accident, Phineas dies. After the death of Phineas, Dr. Harlow convinces Phineas's mother to let him exhume her son's skull and tamping iron. With this indisputable evidence, Dr. Harlow is ready to courageously share his findings about brain science with his colleagues at a meeting of the Massachusetts Medical Society in 1868. Man's understanding of the human brain and how it functions would forever be changed.