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Phineas Gage: A case study
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Case Study: Phineas Gage
the Accident
On the 13th of September 1848, 25 year-old Gage and his crew were working on Rutland and Burlington Railroad near Cavendish in Vermont. His work required drilling deep holes into boulders and filling them with dynamite. While getting ready for an explosion, the powder was ignited and the iron rod propelled at high speed, entering under the left bone cheek and exited through the top of his head.
The rod was 3ft and 8inches in length and 1.25 in diameter. After the incident he was rushed to a physician, who examined his injury. Within a few days his exposed brain got infected with a fungus. However they were able to fully get his brain covered with a wet compress but no surgical treatment.
The effects
Psychological
The relatively hard working Phineas Gage, transformed into a completely different person (according to friends of Gage)
He lost al sense of equilibrium between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities. He became fitful, irreverent and at times he would indulge in the grosses profanities.
He was so different, he was dubbed "not Gage" by his collegues.
Physical
After the accident gage suffered loss of vision in his left eye upon the top of the head was a deep depression, two inches by one and one-half inches [5 cm by 4 cm] wide, beneath which the pulsations of the brain can be perceived.He also had partial paralysis of the left side of the face.
meaning to science
The Study was important to science as it was one of the earliest studies to show the effect of the frontal lobe.
meaning to science
issues with the study
The study does have some ethical issues as the results were all posted with Phineas' consent, which is ethically wrong.
Secondly, many people over exaggerated the studies result to fit their own hypotheses, so many reports are invalid.
Strengths and weaknesses
Strengths
The study showed us many things, such as the effects of losing your frontal lobe, both psychologically and physically.
Weaknesses
The study was unreliable as it would be extremely hard to accurately reproduce because of all the extraneous variables (windspeed when the rod was in the air, amounts of powder used...etc)