September 11, 2013 • 33 mins
In 1848, Phineas Gage experienced a catastrophic brain injury and survived -- though altered -- for more than 11 years. Over time, he morphed into one of the world's most famous case studies in how damage to the brain can affect behavior.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcomed the podcast. I'm
Tracy he Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we have
a massively popular listener request. Yeah, it's one of our
(00:21):
most requested of all times. So many people have asked
us about to talk about Phineas Gauge, and we are
coming up on the hundred and sixty five anniversary of
the accident that made him and his brain famous. So
here we go. I'm gonna talk about him. So today,
it's pretty close to common knowledge that different parts of
your brain have different functions and responsibilities, and this was
(00:44):
far from the case back in when an explosion sent
an iron rod through Phineas Gage's head, destroying his left
frontal lobe. Unlike anyone else in known history who had
ever experienced such a catastrophic brain in jury at that point,
he lived, although altered, for more than eleven more years.
(01:06):
Over time since then, he's kind of morphed into one
of the world's most famous case studies and how damage
to the brain can affect behavior, some of which is
legit and some of which is made up. So we
will talk about that in more detail. I'm holding back
my desire to talk about Futurama and Fries messed up brain.
But anybody who watches Futurama knows what I'm talking about.
(01:27):
Uh So, we don't really know much about phineas though
before his accident, now, before he got put on the
map by the spike, his life really wasn't recorded. We
know he was twenty five on September eighteen forty eight
when the incident happened, and at the time he was
the foreman of a railroad crew worked and they were
at that time working on the bed for the Rutland
(01:48):
and Burlington Railroad. He was, in the words of a
letter written by his doctor to the editor of the
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, in quote of middles Notcher,
vigorous physical organization, temperate habits, and possessed of considerable energy
of character. He was also a good foreman with a
(02:09):
good reputation, and he was competent at his job and
really good at managing the crew, who were all pretty
fond of him. And as you can imagine, building a railroad,
particularly at that time, was a really heavily manual process.
When they had to cut through a hill, the crew
would have to blast their way through rock, and one
group of men would be preparing for the charge to
be laid, and another had to be ready to clear
(02:31):
away the rubble that happened afterward. And his foreman, Phineas,
was responsible for the overall operation of these activities, and
he was the one who was in charge of making
sure the detonations when as planned, which he had been
doing without incident. He was successful until that fateful day. Right, So,
while they were blasting through rock, Phineas used a tamping iron.
(02:54):
This is an iron rod that was forty three inches
long one and a quarter inches in diameter, which one
end of it tapered to a point that was a
quarter engine diameter, and it weighed thirteen and a quarter pounds,
So this thing was longer than your typical baseball bat,
and it was made of iron. And first they would
make a hole, and they'd put gunpowder into the bottom
(03:16):
of this hole, and then uh Phineas would use the
pointed end of his tamping iron to put the fuse
into place, and they'd fill the rest of the hole
of soil, and then he would use the broad end
of the iron to tamp down the dirt before they
lit the fuse. He and his crew were working on
a stretch of track near Cavendish, Vermont, which is a
town that had about people. Walton H. Green described where
(03:41):
this happened, and it could actually describe two different cuts
along the track. So we're not sure precisely where it happened,
but we've got a narrowed down, so he said, at
the second cut south of Cavendish, where many potholes in
the rock give indisputable evidence that Black River once went
this way, near where Roswell down Er built his lime
(04:01):
kiln later. I love that method of giving direction. Later
on there would be a lime kiln, but it wasn't
there at the time. Uh. When the accident happened, they
had made the hole and already poured the powder in,
but they hadn't covered it up with sand yet. So
while he was getting ready to tamp it down, Phineas
turned his head away from what he was doing, and
(04:23):
it seems as though he wrongly thought the gunpowder had
already been covered with sand, but of course, as we said,
it had not, and he lowered the rod to tamp
it down and hit the rock and it made a
spark and at that point the charge exploded. The tamping
iron flew upward. It entered under his left cheekbone and
traveled through the roof of his mouth and behind his eye,
(04:46):
through his brain, and out his skull completely. I I
was misunderstanding this in my earlier like my knowledge pre
podcast knowledge of this, I sort of thought it had logged,
lodged somewhere, no know it traveled completely through his head
and landed several yards away. So this destroyed his skull
(05:07):
in several places, along with obviously part of his brain.
It also pushed against the back of his eyeballs and
his eye was sort of protruding a little bit. He
lost a whole lot of blood from the resulting face
and scalp wounds and the damage to the vessels that
were inside of his brain. And I I want to
go back and look because I think, similar to how
(05:29):
you had the vision of it being lodged, I always
had a vision of it being a spike from above.
And I think it might have been a drawing or
a piece of art at some point that was attributed
as being Phineas gaged that someone drew that might have
had it that way, because I have the same image
in my head of it being a lodged thing. Yeah,
my understanding of this whole accident was completely incorrect before
(05:51):
I learned more about it. It came up from underneath
under his his cheekbone. I know, it's it's crazy. In
the words of a news article in the Boston Post,
which was picked up from the leadlow Vermont Free Soil
Union quote, the most singular circumstance connected with this melancholy
affair is that he was alive at two o'clock this
(06:12):
afternoon and in full possession of his reason and free
from pain. Just let that sit there for a minute.
So not only did he live through this experience, he
may not have even lost consciousness, although there was a
lot of dust and debris following the explosion that had
to settle before people got to him. If he did
(06:34):
lose conscious it was really brief. He was able to
sit upright in the cart while being taken to town
for a doctor, and once he got there he was
able to walk with you know, with some help up
the stairs, which is also studying. Yeah, I can't imagine
who volunteered to help him, you know what I mean?
Can you imagine like that? I don't. I don't want
to do it. Well, he was, Yeah, he was kind
(06:55):
of he was a favored a favored boss by the crew.
They were all fine of him, and I think they
had to have been a bit gruesome. It was definitely gruesome.
It's gonna get more gruesome. So if you are tender
of stomach, let's just say that this may may want
to just fast forward grace for impact, have a friend
screen at first something, because it does get really gross. Yeah.
(07:17):
I I skip over some bits that are particularly disgusting
because it got to a point when I was reading
the day by day notes of what happened is kind
of gross. Yeah, it'll make you squirm, it will. Uh.
So in town, Phineas went to Joseph adams Inn, you know,
his tavern, and the town's doctor, doctor John Martin Harlowe,
(07:37):
wasn't available right away. They couldn't find him, so someone
rode to another nearby town to summon their doctor, who
was Dr Edward Williams. And once Williams got there, Phineas
was feeling well enough to say, well, here's work enough
for you, doctor. Yeah. Yeah, So about an hour later
Dr Harlow got there. He and Dr Williams conferred with
(07:59):
each other and eventually decided that Dr Harlow would be
the one to treat phineas. And here's a side note.
We've kind of beat this into the ground at this point.
If you're tired of hearing it, sorry. The whole thing
was so horrifying and improbable that neither of the doctors
nor a reverend who happened to see them going by
on the way to get the doctor, believed what they
(08:20):
what the crew told them had happened. They were like,
no way, that is impossible. What you were saying cannot
have just happened. Um. They didn't believe it until they
saw the rod in the scene of the accident, where
there was blood and brain matter everywhere, And our knowledge
of the brain wasn't the only thing that was vastly
different in uh. Medical practice was at a completely different
(08:41):
point of its evolution. But the germ theory of disease
had not really happened yet. It was still to come.
So many doctors were treating illnesses by balancing humors because
they didn't realize the issues of germs in bacteria and
more commination. Dr Harlow specifically had graduated with his m d.
From Jefferson Medical Ledge in four although he probably also
(09:03):
studied at Castleton Medical College in Vermont and the Philadelphia
School of Anatomy before he went to Jefferson. His medical
practice was often focused on antiphlogistic principles, and today that
just means anti inflammatory, but at the time it was
this body of ideas that disease came from various sources
(09:23):
of over stimulation or excess which needed to be balanced
in order for the person to be cured. So a
lot of common techniques were bleeding, cupping, applying leeches, and
giving people laxatives and emetics to make them throw up.
Dr Harlow actually credited how much blood Phineas had lost
(09:44):
at the scene of the accident um with helping him
to eventually recover, and the way he described described this
was quote, may we not infer that this prepared the
system for the trying ordeal through which it was about
to pass? Some interesting medical concept. Yeah, Well, there's like
a tiny piece of truth to it, the fact that
(10:04):
he had this open injury instead of it like being
a closed injury, and like his brain had room to
swell without it putting pressure on itself like that Actually
is true, but probably the massive blood luff did not
in fact make it easier overall for his body to heal. Yeah,
and Dr Harlow also was a follower of phrenology, which
(10:27):
you may have heard of. It's that concept that the
different parts of the skull relate to different parts of
a person's character, and that was a really common belief
at the time. Yeah, people have probably seen those pictures
of skulls that have the little um grid lines drawn
around them and they're labeled with what their particular area
pertains to in the person's behavior of personality. There were
(10:50):
no antibiotics or surgical disinfectants then, and handwashing before a
medical procedure was not even a standard practice. So most
of what doctor Harlow did was to clean out obvious
dirt like loose brain tissue and bone fragments out of
the wound um and to try to replace the biggest
pieces of the top of the skull, sort of put
(11:11):
them back in place um, and then close up the
scalp and bandage the whole thing. He also treated and
dressed some pretty extensive burns on Phineas's arms and hands. Uh.
Everyone had been so distracted by the dramatic facial and
head injury that they didn't notice his injuries at first,
but of course this was an explosion related injury, so
(11:31):
it makes sense that he would have had other damage.
During the first few days after his injury, Phineas did
surprisingly well. I mean, he was definitely very ill, but
he continued to ask after the work on the railroad.
He would ask who was acting as the foreman while
he wasn't there. He also declined to see his friends,
saying that he would be back at work in the
(11:52):
day too, so he didn't really need to have visitors.
Um the bleeding gradually slowed and he was more or
less able to sleep, but then he started to develop
abscesses and fevers and the wound became fitted. Dr Harlow's
response was to balance the humors, prescribing a medics and
lass laxatives as well as silver nitrate to treat what
(12:14):
he described as quote fungus, which may have actually been
fungus coming from the brain. It's pretty disgusting. Yeah, I mean,
it's not a short walk to presume that, uh uh,
the wound of this nature treated in the manner it
was would have some infection issues. Yeah. He also bled
Phineas and drained the pus from the wound, both of
(12:36):
which were motivated by this idea of getting rid of
the excess and balancing the humors. But of all the things,
they may have been of actual real medical use in
this case, since they would have reduced some of the
pressure going on inside of his skull and in the
case of the pus, removed infectious material from his body.
And Phineas had been able to see a little out
(12:57):
of his left eye for a while after the acts it,
but he did eventually lose all sight in it, along
with the ability to open it, so it's kind of
permanently shut. Right. He got a lot worse before he
started to get better, and at some points he was
nearly comatose. In September, his friends and family went ahead
and picked out a coffin and decided what clothes they
(13:18):
were going to give they were going to put on
him to be buried in, and at least one of
the people attending him so that they should stop treating
him since it was just prolonging the inevitable. But eventually
he started to rally and changes in his behavior began
to be apparent. While he was still under Dr Harlowe's care.
For example, on October eleven, Doctor Harlow offered him one
(13:40):
thousand dollars for some pebbles that he had collected, and
Phineas refused. A little later in October, when he was
really starting to improve pretty steadily after that dramatic downturn,
he decided he was ready to go home and he
planned to walk there. It was twenty miles away, so
he went out shopping for some provisions he was going
(14:02):
to need, and he did so in bare feet with
no coat on. So remember this was Vermont. This exposure
set him back a little bit, but by the end
of November he was able to go home to his family.
So obviously he was having some judgment issues at that point.
He you know, would turn down a large sum of
money for for some rocks, for some rocks which who
(14:23):
wouldn't want to take? I would take a thousand dollars
for pebbles right now? Uh. And then he put himself
in danger kind of thoughtlessly. But Dr Harlowe attended to
him for ten weeks. Uh. And then Phineas went home
to Lebanon, New Hampshire by carriage and he stayed until
April continuing to recuperate. So, of course, one of the
things I mean, apart from having his brain partially destroyed
(14:46):
by a giant iron rod, one of the things that
he is really famous for is for the change in
behavior that came afterwards. Um, a lot of this is
portrayed is like he just became unable to work and
unable to hold a job, and that's not really accurate.
His recuperation did continue to be pretty slow even after
he left Dr Harlowe's care, but he really wanted to
(15:08):
get back to work and he started working on his
parents farm. By the middle of the following year, which
was eighteen forty nine, he was barely able to do
a whole day's work there. So even as he was
recovering seemingly pretty well physically, his personality had changed. And
we described him before the accident as being very smart, competent,
(15:29):
and reliable, But after the accident, Dr Harlowe described him
as fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity,
which had not previously been his custom manifesting but little
deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when
it conflicts with his desires at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet
(15:50):
capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operation which
are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn
for others, appearing more feasible at child in his intellectual
capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a
strong man. So most of what we know about Phineas's
behavior after the accident comes from Dr Harlow, and there's
(16:13):
a little bit of question today as to whether this
account is entirely reliable. His belief in phrenology might have
colored his perception of Phineas's behavior, especially considering that some
of his writings about him include specific phrenological terms such
as nervo bilious. But regardless even his friends and acquaintances,
(16:35):
we're saying that he was no longer gauge Uh. Consequently,
when he felt physically ready to return to work again,
his old employer wouldn't have him back. There's a lot
of popular writing about him today that sort of characterizes
him at this point as a completely unreliable, unemployable, violent drifter. Um.
This is completely inaccurate. He did find steady work after
(16:58):
he recovered, although that did not involve handling explosives anymore,
which would make sense. He went to Boston for a
while in eighteen fifty where he was under the observation
of Henry J. Bigelow of Harvard, and he presented at
the Boston He was presented at the Boston Society for
Medical Improvement and to a medical class at the hospital,
(17:20):
and Dr Bigelow also made a life cast of Phineas's head,
showing the outward physical damage that was still evidence even
once the initial wounds had healed. He spent some time
at Barnum's American Museum in New York City and gave
a couple of lectures and exhibitions about his accident in
the Northeast sometime in the early eighteen fifties. And this
seems to be sort of the the total of his
(17:43):
public display. Like sometimes people say that he traveled around
with a freak show and he became this freak show
performer um, and that seems to be an exaggeration of
what was more a couple of exhibitions or lectures that
he was in. And in early eighteen fifty one he
was hired by Jonathan Courier to work at a Livery
stable in New Hampshire, and he worked there for about
(18:05):
a year and a half. Then in August of eighteen
fifty two, a man who was starting a new carriage
company hired him to come work with him in Chili.
Phineas worked in a stable and drove a stagecoach in
Chili for about seven years. And we've talked about how
demanding the job of a stage coach driver is in
our recent episode about Charlie Parkhurst. So it seems as though,
(18:27):
contrary to some of the popular writing about him, he
did recover some of his mental abilities, or at least
adapt to life without them. Um it may even be
that the really routine work of driving the same the
same stagecoach route, day after day after day gradually helped
his brain adapt, and eventually, as his health began to fail,
(18:47):
he went out to San Francisco, where his family had
moved in pursuit of the gold Rush. He was pretty
sick when he got there, but he recovered somewhat and
was able to work for a while on a farm
in Santa Clara, But then he had a series of seizures.
They got more and more serious, and he died in
May of eighteen sixty He was buried on May twenty
(19:08):
three of that year, and there was no top. There
was no autopsy, but in eighteen sixty seven his body
was exhumed and his skull and the tamping iron were
sent to Dr Harlow, and Dr Harlow eventually sent those
to the Warren Anatomical Museum at Harvard, which already had
Dr Bigelow's life cast. So you can actually see all
(19:29):
three of these things at the Warren Museum Exhibition gallery
at the Countway Library of Medicine. Thanks to this skull
and a lot of modern imaging work, today we have
a much better idea of the exact extent of Phineas's injuries,
especially where the rod went. Besides the obvious through his head,
his skull was damaged in multiple places uh you would expect,
(19:53):
under the cheekbone, at the back of the eye socket,
and the top of his head. And so he lived
for the rest of his life with parts of his
skull missing entirely, including a pretty significant sized patch from
the top of his head. A number of researchers have
tried to tackle the question of exactly how the rod
traveled through his head and brain, and exactly what parts
(20:13):
of his brain were damaged, because some of the holes
that were in his skull were smaller than the diameter
of the rod, which, like the one under his cheekbone,
was smaller than the rod was, and then the one
at the top of his head was a lot bigger. UM.
A lot of their findings didn't really agree with one
another until we developed tools like CT scans to look
at the skull itself UM and m R eyes of
(20:37):
living people's brains to create kind of a model for
what gauges might have looked like. In two thousand four,
researchers use set scans of the skull to create a
three D representation of Phineasa's skull to try to determine
exactly where the damage occurred, and their conclusion factors in
that some of the bone at the entry wound must
(20:57):
have moved out of the way almost like a hinge,
and then close back down and later healed over since
the entry wound on the skull under the cheekbone is
smaller than the rod itself. In a team of researchers
led by John Darryl Van Horne published a paper called
Mapping Connectivity Damage in the case of Phineas Gage. It
(21:17):
used all kinds of medical imaging techniques to map out
exactly which parts of the brain would have been damaged,
and this is where they used m R eyes of
other patients to to sort of work up a model.
Their findings are in p l OS one, so you
can read them online for free, and at this point
most of the modern computational studies agree that the damage
(21:38):
was really confined to the left frontal lobe. Phineas became
really famous in the world of neuropsychology today. He's a
case study in many many psychology and neuroscience textbooks in
chapters about how an injury to the brain can change
a person's personality. But a lot of the writing about
him today really sort of retroactively give his story a
(22:00):
lot of credit for everything from lobotomyes to how doctors
diagnosed tumors and people's frontal lobes based on changes in
their behavior. But a lot of this is really hindsight
and sometimes it's uh kind of pulled out of thin air.
There's a little bit of making things up going on.
So his accident, the fact that he survived it, and
(22:20):
the fact that he basically recovered and lived for more
than eleven more years. All of that definitely contributed to
the fields of neurosurgery and neuropsychology, and and they were
on their own pretty incredible. He really was long dead
by the time surgery and sterilization techniques progressed to the
point that neurosurgery surgery was even a survivable event. And
(22:43):
a lot of the writing about him also ascribes what
we later learned about lobotomy and brain tumor patients to
Phineas himself, sort of applying other people's behavior after the
destruction of their frontal lobes to phineas his behavior when
he lived. But these descriptions which we mentioned before that
he became violent and shiftless and couldn't hold a job,
they just don't match up with the descriptions of people
(23:05):
that actually examined him and until that were around him.
He kind of gets conflated with descriptions of other patients
with completely different conditions that also involved their frontal lobe
in some way. Yeah, their symptoms get attributed to his
behavior or ascribed to his behavior when they weren't really
going on. A lot of people also cite him as
(23:26):
one of the patients who helped neurologists figure out that
different parts of our brains do different jobs, and this
definitely was not the case at the time. UM. Doctors
really knew very little about the brain, and there were
two contradictory and competing theories. One was that the brain
was basically this undifferentiated thing with all of the parts
(23:46):
of the brain able to handle any task, and the other,
which included the phrenologists that we've talked about before, believe
that different locations in the brain had different functions. Both
of these groups claimed that Gauge was supporting their theory.
The people who thought that the brain could do anything
from any part, we're like, well, he survived, clearly all
(24:07):
the other parts of the brain made up for it. UM.
And the people who thought that the different parts of
the brain had different functions were like, well, his behavior changed,
so clearly he supports our theory. UM. So this did
add to the whole field and the whole world of
things that we know about the brain. But there are
other doctors and other patients who actually had a much
(24:29):
bigger impact on this idea that the different parts of
the brains do different things. In particular, Dr Kyl Wernicky
and Dr Paul Broca, who each worked with patients who
have had damage to specific areas that affected their ability
to use language. So Wernicky and broke Out have parts
of the brain named after them based on their research.
(24:50):
Um without those kind of developments, we we could not
have jumped to the idea that different parts of the
brain did different things just based on anas Gauges case right,
And we do have a couple of pictures of Phineas Gauge.
Vintage photo collectors Jack and Beverly Wilgas acquired one somewhere
along the line. Yeah, I don't really remember where. They
(25:11):
put it on Flicker in two thousand seven, and eventually
Internet chatter identified it as likely be engaged, and this
was eventually confirmed by matching the photo to the life
cast that set the museum and Gauge. His family released
another picture in the life mask of Phineas's head and
his skull and the tamping iron are all at Warren
(25:33):
Anatomical Museum at Harvard Medical School. The rod has this inscription,
this is the bar that was shot through the head
of Mr Phineas P. Gauge at Cavendish, Vermont, September You
fully recovered from the injury and deposited this bar in
the museum at the Medical College of Harvard University. UH.
And then there is a name and some other dating.
(25:54):
So what's funny. There's a couple of funny things about this.
One is that his name is spelled wrong, and the
other is the the date is wrong and exactly how
this all came to be as kind of lost to history.
At some point he gave the rod to Harvard's Medical
school museum, and then he asked for it back in
eighteen fifty four, but the inscription is dated eighteen fifty
(26:16):
so this is all sort of in addition to being
kind of weird and misspelled. It calls into question this
uh frequent thing that you may hear about Phineas, which
is that he carried the rod around with him forever
after the accident. Clearly he did not do that, UM.
But clearly he also did want it because he asked
for it back from Harvard, so that's a little unclear
(26:38):
at this point. There's also a commemorative plaque in the
ca in Cavendish, Vermont, UH and it was unveiled on
September thirteenth, which was the fiftieth anniversary of Phineas's accident.
There's also a book called An Odd Kind of Fame,
Stories of Phineas Gage by Malcolm McMillan. It's not the
only book about him, but it came out in in
(26:59):
the r two thousand and it gives a really thorough
history of Phineas and accident um and it debunks a
lot of the popular perception of him and his life
and how he behaved afterward. So it is I think
the most thorough work on him that you can get
in one place today. Yeah, which is good because there's
a lot of mythology that's growing and I understand how
(27:20):
that happens. It's such a bizarre phenomenal thing. Yeah, it's
easy to then accept some other pretty incredible details about
the story, right well, and it's it's one of those
stories that now it's it's almost as interesting for how
it became this sort of neuroscience juggernaut as for the
actual accident that happened. So yes, fascinating And he escage
(27:44):
hundred and sixty five years ago a tamping rod had
a little accident through his entire skull. Do you also
have listener mail for our enjoyment? I do this is
from Elizabeth, and Elizabeth says, I was so excited for
your Charlie Park first podcast. I've spent many years working
in the mountains of Santa Cruz practicing forestry and timber harvesting.
(28:07):
I thought I would give you some background on the
area to add some flavor to your image of Charlie.
The Santa Cruz Mountains in the eighteen hundreds were absolutely formidable.
In California, we have mountains that to Georgia style mountains
for breakfast. The Santa Cruz Mountains are really steep. There's
random cracks in the earth from earthquakes, cliffs, and any
water course essentially has a steep inner gorge surrounding it.
(28:31):
In the winter, we get rained from about November to
April and it just rained the whole time. Even in
the modern era, roads are slick, mudflides are a huge problem,
rivers become torrents, and remote mountains homes routinely get cut
off from civilization. Add to all that, in the eighteen hundreds,
mountain lions and bears routinely roamed the area. Santa Cruz
(28:51):
has always been slightly off from the larger San Francisco
Bay to the north, and the moderate. The Montery area
was difficult to get to as well because it s
stu aries. The current main road over the hill is
referred to as Killer seventeen because it is incredibly windy, steep, narrow,
and for a long time had no median divider. Back
(29:12):
in the olden days, whips and stagecoach companies used to
find the roads and passages quote over the hill and
try to outdo each other transporting people over the rough terrain.
One of the places I worked as a road prism
that was one of these stagecoach roads and is still
a visible road cut through the woods, slide slopes of
and then randomly nice flat road. You can still drive
small truck on. One thing you forgot to mention in
(29:35):
the podcast, maybe because you were not aware that is
the reason. In fact, there was another Mountain Charlie in
the area that was maybe more famous in the Santa
Cruz area. There's even a Mount Charlie road named after him.
He was another grizzled tough whip who lost an eye
when it was swiped in a fight with a fare
Although he couldn't drive teams anywhere, he set up a
(29:57):
toll on one of his passages over the hill. Uh,
and then she sends a link to that mountain, Charlie.
So number one, thank you, Elizabeth. Um. Well, I have
not been to the Santa Cruz Mountains in particular, but
I have driven up to Lake Arrowhead in California a
couple of times for Maximum con um and it is
(30:17):
definitely a whole different experience from the Appalachian Mountains, which
I am much more used to. And what's deceptive is
that it starts out feeling a whole lot like I've
already going up to Asheville, except it it keeps going,
and it goes and goes and goes some more, and
then it keeps going and then you look down and
there's clouds under you, and it's a little alarming and weird. Um.
(30:38):
I have never driven it. I think I have driven.
I've been in a vehicle with my parents driving through it.
I remember being rather terrified. Yeah, I'm a little bit
of a nervous Nellie in the car sometimes. Well. And
the you know, if if any of you have ever
heard of maximun con it's a the Maximum Fund podcast network,
I thing that they have every year. Um. And there
(30:59):
was a lot of this shin on the forums about, Hey,
I hear this road is really terrifying to drive on.
And uh, you know, I said, I used to drive
to Asheville and back. Will I be okay? And people like, oh, yeah,
sure you'll be fine, and they were right. I mean,
I was pretty much fine, but there was this moment
when I sort of saw down how extremely high up
I was. For a brief second, you were not fine. Yeah.
(31:21):
And then last the last time that I went, I
made a wrong turn and wound up just sort of
on this road that was running along the ridge in
the mountains there for a really long time. And that
was that was definitely a little alarming. So yes, thank
you Elizabeth for writing to us. We definitely did not
hear about the other mountains Charley um in our research,
(31:43):
and it's so many great details about the area. It
really does help contextualize at all. And yeah, we pretty
much said this was terrifying, but we didn't know a
lot of terrifying tail I'm extra terrified. I while I
would like to be a lighthousekeeper, I do not want
to be a stage coach driver in the Santa Cruz Mountain. Okay,
if you would like to write to us about stage
(32:06):
coaches or crazy industrial accidents, maybe not that, or anything
else you can. We are at uh History podcast at
discovery dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot
com slash history class stuff, and on Twitter at mist
in History. You can find our tumbler at Miston History
dot tumbler dot com, and we've been pinning things about
(32:26):
our episodes and other historical stuff on Pinterest. If you
would like to learn some more about something related to
what we've talked about today, you can come to our
website and put the word lobotomy in our search bar
and you will find the article how lobotomies work. You
can learn about that and a whole lot more at
our website, which is how stuff Works dot com for
(32:50):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it
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(33:12):
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when you sign up today
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcomed the podcast. I'm
Tracy he Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we have
a massively popular listener request. Yeah, it's one of our
(00:21):
most requested of all times. So many people have asked
us about to talk about Phineas Gauge, and we are
coming up on the hundred and sixty five anniversary of
the accident that made him and his brain famous. So
here we go. I'm gonna talk about him. So today,
it's pretty close to common knowledge that different parts of
your brain have different functions and responsibilities, and this was
(00:44):
far from the case back in when an explosion sent
an iron rod through Phineas Gage's head, destroying his left
frontal lobe. Unlike anyone else in known history who had
ever experienced such a catastrophic brain in jury at that point,
he lived, although altered, for more than eleven more years.
(01:06):
Over time since then, he's kind of morphed into one
of the world's most famous case studies and how damage
to the brain can affect behavior, some of which is
legit and some of which is made up. So we
will talk about that in more detail. I'm holding back
my desire to talk about Futurama and Fries messed up brain.
But anybody who watches Futurama knows what I'm talking about.
(01:27):
Uh So, we don't really know much about phineas though
before his accident, now, before he got put on the
map by the spike, his life really wasn't recorded. We
know he was twenty five on September eighteen forty eight
when the incident happened, and at the time he was
the foreman of a railroad crew worked and they were
at that time working on the bed for the Rutland
(01:48):
and Burlington Railroad. He was, in the words of a
letter written by his doctor to the editor of the
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, in quote of middles Notcher,
vigorous physical organization, temperate habits, and possessed of considerable energy
of character. He was also a good foreman with a
(02:09):
good reputation, and he was competent at his job and
really good at managing the crew, who were all pretty
fond of him. And as you can imagine, building a railroad,
particularly at that time, was a really heavily manual process.
When they had to cut through a hill, the crew
would have to blast their way through rock, and one
group of men would be preparing for the charge to
be laid, and another had to be ready to clear
(02:31):
away the rubble that happened afterward. And his foreman, Phineas,
was responsible for the overall operation of these activities, and
he was the one who was in charge of making
sure the detonations when as planned, which he had been
doing without incident. He was successful until that fateful day. Right, So,
while they were blasting through rock, Phineas used a tamping iron.
(02:54):
This is an iron rod that was forty three inches
long one and a quarter inches in diameter, which one
end of it tapered to a point that was a
quarter engine diameter, and it weighed thirteen and a quarter pounds,
So this thing was longer than your typical baseball bat,
and it was made of iron. And first they would
make a hole, and they'd put gunpowder into the bottom
(03:16):
of this hole, and then uh Phineas would use the
pointed end of his tamping iron to put the fuse
into place, and they'd fill the rest of the hole
of soil, and then he would use the broad end
of the iron to tamp down the dirt before they
lit the fuse. He and his crew were working on
a stretch of track near Cavendish, Vermont, which is a
town that had about people. Walton H. Green described where
(03:41):
this happened, and it could actually describe two different cuts
along the track. So we're not sure precisely where it happened,
but we've got a narrowed down, so he said, at
the second cut south of Cavendish, where many potholes in
the rock give indisputable evidence that Black River once went
this way, near where Roswell down Er built his lime
(04:01):
kiln later. I love that method of giving direction. Later
on there would be a lime kiln, but it wasn't
there at the time. Uh. When the accident happened, they
had made the hole and already poured the powder in,
but they hadn't covered it up with sand yet. So
while he was getting ready to tamp it down, Phineas
turned his head away from what he was doing, and
(04:23):
it seems as though he wrongly thought the gunpowder had
already been covered with sand, but of course, as we said,
it had not, and he lowered the rod to tamp
it down and hit the rock and it made a
spark and at that point the charge exploded. The tamping
iron flew upward. It entered under his left cheekbone and
traveled through the roof of his mouth and behind his eye,
(04:46):
through his brain, and out his skull completely. I I
was misunderstanding this in my earlier like my knowledge pre
podcast knowledge of this, I sort of thought it had logged,
lodged somewhere, no know it traveled completely through his head
and landed several yards away. So this destroyed his skull
(05:07):
in several places, along with obviously part of his brain.
It also pushed against the back of his eyeballs and
his eye was sort of protruding a little bit. He
lost a whole lot of blood from the resulting face
and scalp wounds and the damage to the vessels that
were inside of his brain. And I I want to
go back and look because I think, similar to how
(05:29):
you had the vision of it being lodged, I always
had a vision of it being a spike from above.
And I think it might have been a drawing or
a piece of art at some point that was attributed
as being Phineas gaged that someone drew that might have
had it that way, because I have the same image
in my head of it being a lodged thing. Yeah,
my understanding of this whole accident was completely incorrect before
(05:51):
I learned more about it. It came up from underneath
under his his cheekbone. I know, it's it's crazy. In
the words of a news article in the Boston Post,
which was picked up from the leadlow Vermont Free Soil
Union quote, the most singular circumstance connected with this melancholy
affair is that he was alive at two o'clock this
(06:12):
afternoon and in full possession of his reason and free
from pain. Just let that sit there for a minute.
So not only did he live through this experience, he
may not have even lost consciousness, although there was a
lot of dust and debris following the explosion that had
to settle before people got to him. If he did
(06:34):
lose conscious it was really brief. He was able to
sit upright in the cart while being taken to town
for a doctor, and once he got there he was
able to walk with you know, with some help up
the stairs, which is also studying. Yeah, I can't imagine
who volunteered to help him, you know what I mean?
Can you imagine like that? I don't. I don't want
to do it. Well, he was, Yeah, he was kind
(06:55):
of he was a favored a favored boss by the crew.
They were all fine of him, and I think they
had to have been a bit gruesome. It was definitely gruesome.
It's gonna get more gruesome. So if you are tender
of stomach, let's just say that this may may want
to just fast forward grace for impact, have a friend
screen at first something, because it does get really gross. Yeah.
(07:17):
I I skip over some bits that are particularly disgusting
because it got to a point when I was reading
the day by day notes of what happened is kind
of gross. Yeah, it'll make you squirm, it will. Uh.
So in town, Phineas went to Joseph adams Inn, you know,
his tavern, and the town's doctor, doctor John Martin Harlowe,
(07:37):
wasn't available right away. They couldn't find him, so someone
rode to another nearby town to summon their doctor, who
was Dr Edward Williams. And once Williams got there, Phineas
was feeling well enough to say, well, here's work enough
for you, doctor. Yeah. Yeah, So about an hour later
Dr Harlow got there. He and Dr Williams conferred with
(07:59):
each other and eventually decided that Dr Harlow would be
the one to treat phineas. And here's a side note.
We've kind of beat this into the ground at this point.
If you're tired of hearing it, sorry. The whole thing
was so horrifying and improbable that neither of the doctors
nor a reverend who happened to see them going by
on the way to get the doctor, believed what they
(08:20):
what the crew told them had happened. They were like,
no way, that is impossible. What you were saying cannot
have just happened. Um. They didn't believe it until they
saw the rod in the scene of the accident, where
there was blood and brain matter everywhere, And our knowledge
of the brain wasn't the only thing that was vastly
different in uh. Medical practice was at a completely different
(08:41):
point of its evolution. But the germ theory of disease
had not really happened yet. It was still to come.
So many doctors were treating illnesses by balancing humors because
they didn't realize the issues of germs in bacteria and
more commination. Dr Harlow specifically had graduated with his m d.
From Jefferson Medical Ledge in four although he probably also
(09:03):
studied at Castleton Medical College in Vermont and the Philadelphia
School of Anatomy before he went to Jefferson. His medical
practice was often focused on antiphlogistic principles, and today that
just means anti inflammatory, but at the time it was
this body of ideas that disease came from various sources
(09:23):
of over stimulation or excess which needed to be balanced
in order for the person to be cured. So a
lot of common techniques were bleeding, cupping, applying leeches, and
giving people laxatives and emetics to make them throw up.
Dr Harlow actually credited how much blood Phineas had lost
(09:44):
at the scene of the accident um with helping him
to eventually recover, and the way he described described this
was quote, may we not infer that this prepared the
system for the trying ordeal through which it was about
to pass? Some interesting medical concept. Yeah, Well, there's like
a tiny piece of truth to it, the fact that
(10:04):
he had this open injury instead of it like being
a closed injury, and like his brain had room to
swell without it putting pressure on itself like that Actually
is true, but probably the massive blood luff did not
in fact make it easier overall for his body to heal. Yeah,
and Dr Harlow also was a follower of phrenology, which
(10:27):
you may have heard of. It's that concept that the
different parts of the skull relate to different parts of
a person's character, and that was a really common belief
at the time. Yeah, people have probably seen those pictures
of skulls that have the little um grid lines drawn
around them and they're labeled with what their particular area
pertains to in the person's behavior of personality. There were
(10:50):
no antibiotics or surgical disinfectants then, and handwashing before a
medical procedure was not even a standard practice. So most
of what doctor Harlow did was to clean out obvious
dirt like loose brain tissue and bone fragments out of
the wound um and to try to replace the biggest
pieces of the top of the skull, sort of put
(11:11):
them back in place um, and then close up the
scalp and bandage the whole thing. He also treated and
dressed some pretty extensive burns on Phineas's arms and hands. Uh.
Everyone had been so distracted by the dramatic facial and
head injury that they didn't notice his injuries at first,
but of course this was an explosion related injury, so
(11:31):
it makes sense that he would have had other damage.
During the first few days after his injury, Phineas did
surprisingly well. I mean, he was definitely very ill, but
he continued to ask after the work on the railroad.
He would ask who was acting as the foreman while
he wasn't there. He also declined to see his friends,
saying that he would be back at work in the
(11:52):
day too, so he didn't really need to have visitors.
Um the bleeding gradually slowed and he was more or
less able to sleep, but then he started to develop
abscesses and fevers and the wound became fitted. Dr Harlow's
response was to balance the humors, prescribing a medics and
lass laxatives as well as silver nitrate to treat what
(12:14):
he described as quote fungus, which may have actually been
fungus coming from the brain. It's pretty disgusting. Yeah, I mean,
it's not a short walk to presume that, uh uh,
the wound of this nature treated in the manner it
was would have some infection issues. Yeah. He also bled
Phineas and drained the pus from the wound, both of
(12:36):
which were motivated by this idea of getting rid of
the excess and balancing the humors. But of all the things,
they may have been of actual real medical use in
this case, since they would have reduced some of the
pressure going on inside of his skull and in the
case of the pus, removed infectious material from his body.
And Phineas had been able to see a little out
(12:57):
of his left eye for a while after the acts it,
but he did eventually lose all sight in it, along
with the ability to open it, so it's kind of
permanently shut. Right. He got a lot worse before he
started to get better, and at some points he was
nearly comatose. In September, his friends and family went ahead
and picked out a coffin and decided what clothes they
(13:18):
were going to give they were going to put on
him to be buried in, and at least one of
the people attending him so that they should stop treating
him since it was just prolonging the inevitable. But eventually
he started to rally and changes in his behavior began
to be apparent. While he was still under Dr Harlowe's care.
For example, on October eleven, Doctor Harlow offered him one
(13:40):
thousand dollars for some pebbles that he had collected, and
Phineas refused. A little later in October, when he was
really starting to improve pretty steadily after that dramatic downturn,
he decided he was ready to go home and he
planned to walk there. It was twenty miles away, so
he went out shopping for some provisions he was going
(14:02):
to need, and he did so in bare feet with
no coat on. So remember this was Vermont. This exposure
set him back a little bit, but by the end
of November he was able to go home to his family.
So obviously he was having some judgment issues at that point.
He you know, would turn down a large sum of
money for for some rocks, for some rocks which who
(14:23):
wouldn't want to take? I would take a thousand dollars
for pebbles right now? Uh. And then he put himself
in danger kind of thoughtlessly. But Dr Harlowe attended to
him for ten weeks. Uh. And then Phineas went home
to Lebanon, New Hampshire by carriage and he stayed until
April continuing to recuperate. So, of course, one of the
things I mean, apart from having his brain partially destroyed
(14:46):
by a giant iron rod, one of the things that
he is really famous for is for the change in
behavior that came afterwards. Um, a lot of this is
portrayed is like he just became unable to work and
unable to hold a job, and that's not really accurate.
His recuperation did continue to be pretty slow even after
he left Dr Harlowe's care, but he really wanted to
(15:08):
get back to work and he started working on his
parents farm. By the middle of the following year, which
was eighteen forty nine, he was barely able to do
a whole day's work there. So even as he was
recovering seemingly pretty well physically, his personality had changed. And
we described him before the accident as being very smart, competent,
(15:29):
and reliable, But after the accident, Dr Harlowe described him
as fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity,
which had not previously been his custom manifesting but little
deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when
it conflicts with his desires at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet
(15:50):
capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operation which
are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn
for others, appearing more feasible at child in his intellectual
capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a
strong man. So most of what we know about Phineas's
behavior after the accident comes from Dr Harlow, and there's
(16:13):
a little bit of question today as to whether this
account is entirely reliable. His belief in phrenology might have
colored his perception of Phineas's behavior, especially considering that some
of his writings about him include specific phrenological terms such
as nervo bilious. But regardless even his friends and acquaintances,
(16:35):
we're saying that he was no longer gauge Uh. Consequently,
when he felt physically ready to return to work again,
his old employer wouldn't have him back. There's a lot
of popular writing about him today that sort of characterizes
him at this point as a completely unreliable, unemployable, violent drifter. Um.
This is completely inaccurate. He did find steady work after
(16:58):
he recovered, although that did not involve handling explosives anymore,
which would make sense. He went to Boston for a
while in eighteen fifty where he was under the observation
of Henry J. Bigelow of Harvard, and he presented at
the Boston He was presented at the Boston Society for
Medical Improvement and to a medical class at the hospital,
(17:20):
and Dr Bigelow also made a life cast of Phineas's head,
showing the outward physical damage that was still evidence even
once the initial wounds had healed. He spent some time
at Barnum's American Museum in New York City and gave
a couple of lectures and exhibitions about his accident in
the Northeast sometime in the early eighteen fifties. And this
seems to be sort of the the total of his
(17:43):
public display. Like sometimes people say that he traveled around
with a freak show and he became this freak show
performer um, and that seems to be an exaggeration of
what was more a couple of exhibitions or lectures that
he was in. And in early eighteen fifty one he
was hired by Jonathan Courier to work at a Livery
stable in New Hampshire, and he worked there for about
(18:05):
a year and a half. Then in August of eighteen
fifty two, a man who was starting a new carriage
company hired him to come work with him in Chili.
Phineas worked in a stable and drove a stagecoach in
Chili for about seven years. And we've talked about how
demanding the job of a stage coach driver is in
our recent episode about Charlie Parkhurst. So it seems as though,
(18:27):
contrary to some of the popular writing about him, he
did recover some of his mental abilities, or at least
adapt to life without them. Um it may even be
that the really routine work of driving the same the
same stagecoach route, day after day after day gradually helped
his brain adapt, and eventually, as his health began to fail,
(18:47):
he went out to San Francisco, where his family had
moved in pursuit of the gold Rush. He was pretty
sick when he got there, but he recovered somewhat and
was able to work for a while on a farm
in Santa Clara, But then he had a series of seizures.
They got more and more serious, and he died in
May of eighteen sixty He was buried on May twenty
(19:08):
three of that year, and there was no top. There
was no autopsy, but in eighteen sixty seven his body
was exhumed and his skull and the tamping iron were
sent to Dr Harlow, and Dr Harlow eventually sent those
to the Warren Anatomical Museum at Harvard, which already had
Dr Bigelow's life cast. So you can actually see all
(19:29):
three of these things at the Warren Museum Exhibition gallery
at the Countway Library of Medicine. Thanks to this skull
and a lot of modern imaging work, today we have
a much better idea of the exact extent of Phineas's injuries,
especially where the rod went. Besides the obvious through his head,
his skull was damaged in multiple places uh you would expect,
(19:53):
under the cheekbone, at the back of the eye socket,
and the top of his head. And so he lived
for the rest of his life with parts of his
skull missing entirely, including a pretty significant sized patch from
the top of his head. A number of researchers have
tried to tackle the question of exactly how the rod
traveled through his head and brain, and exactly what parts
(20:13):
of his brain were damaged, because some of the holes
that were in his skull were smaller than the diameter
of the rod, which, like the one under his cheekbone,
was smaller than the rod was, and then the one
at the top of his head was a lot bigger. UM.
A lot of their findings didn't really agree with one
another until we developed tools like CT scans to look
at the skull itself UM and m R eyes of
(20:37):
living people's brains to create kind of a model for
what gauges might have looked like. In two thousand four,
researchers use set scans of the skull to create a
three D representation of Phineasa's skull to try to determine
exactly where the damage occurred, and their conclusion factors in
that some of the bone at the entry wound must
(20:57):
have moved out of the way almost like a hinge,
and then close back down and later healed over since
the entry wound on the skull under the cheekbone is
smaller than the rod itself. In a team of researchers
led by John Darryl Van Horne published a paper called
Mapping Connectivity Damage in the case of Phineas Gage. It
(21:17):
used all kinds of medical imaging techniques to map out
exactly which parts of the brain would have been damaged,
and this is where they used m R eyes of
other patients to to sort of work up a model.
Their findings are in p l OS one, so you
can read them online for free, and at this point
most of the modern computational studies agree that the damage
(21:38):
was really confined to the left frontal lobe. Phineas became
really famous in the world of neuropsychology today. He's a
case study in many many psychology and neuroscience textbooks in
chapters about how an injury to the brain can change
a person's personality. But a lot of the writing about
him today really sort of retroactively give his story a
(22:00):
lot of credit for everything from lobotomyes to how doctors
diagnosed tumors and people's frontal lobes based on changes in
their behavior. But a lot of this is really hindsight
and sometimes it's uh kind of pulled out of thin air.
There's a little bit of making things up going on.
So his accident, the fact that he survived it, and
(22:20):
the fact that he basically recovered and lived for more
than eleven more years. All of that definitely contributed to
the fields of neurosurgery and neuropsychology, and and they were
on their own pretty incredible. He really was long dead
by the time surgery and sterilization techniques progressed to the
point that neurosurgery surgery was even a survivable event. And
(22:43):
a lot of the writing about him also ascribes what
we later learned about lobotomy and brain tumor patients to
Phineas himself, sort of applying other people's behavior after the
destruction of their frontal lobes to phineas his behavior when
he lived. But these descriptions which we mentioned before that
he became violent and shiftless and couldn't hold a job,
they just don't match up with the descriptions of people
(23:05):
that actually examined him and until that were around him.
He kind of gets conflated with descriptions of other patients
with completely different conditions that also involved their frontal lobe
in some way. Yeah, their symptoms get attributed to his
behavior or ascribed to his behavior when they weren't really
going on. A lot of people also cite him as
(23:26):
one of the patients who helped neurologists figure out that
different parts of our brains do different jobs, and this
definitely was not the case at the time. UM. Doctors
really knew very little about the brain, and there were
two contradictory and competing theories. One was that the brain
was basically this undifferentiated thing with all of the parts
(23:46):
of the brain able to handle any task, and the other,
which included the phrenologists that we've talked about before, believe
that different locations in the brain had different functions. Both
of these groups claimed that Gauge was supporting their theory.
The people who thought that the brain could do anything
from any part, we're like, well, he survived, clearly all
(24:07):
the other parts of the brain made up for it. UM.
And the people who thought that the different parts of
the brain had different functions were like, well, his behavior changed,
so clearly he supports our theory. UM. So this did
add to the whole field and the whole world of
things that we know about the brain. But there are
other doctors and other patients who actually had a much
(24:29):
bigger impact on this idea that the different parts of
the brains do different things. In particular, Dr Kyl Wernicky
and Dr Paul Broca, who each worked with patients who
have had damage to specific areas that affected their ability
to use language. So Wernicky and broke Out have parts
of the brain named after them based on their research.
(24:50):
Um without those kind of developments, we we could not
have jumped to the idea that different parts of the
brain did different things just based on anas Gauges case right,
And we do have a couple of pictures of Phineas Gauge.
Vintage photo collectors Jack and Beverly Wilgas acquired one somewhere
along the line. Yeah, I don't really remember where. They
(25:11):
put it on Flicker in two thousand seven, and eventually
Internet chatter identified it as likely be engaged, and this
was eventually confirmed by matching the photo to the life
cast that set the museum and Gauge. His family released
another picture in the life mask of Phineas's head and
his skull and the tamping iron are all at Warren
(25:33):
Anatomical Museum at Harvard Medical School. The rod has this inscription,
this is the bar that was shot through the head
of Mr Phineas P. Gauge at Cavendish, Vermont, September You
fully recovered from the injury and deposited this bar in
the museum at the Medical College of Harvard University. UH.
And then there is a name and some other dating.
(25:54):
So what's funny. There's a couple of funny things about this.
One is that his name is spelled wrong, and the
other is the the date is wrong and exactly how
this all came to be as kind of lost to history.
At some point he gave the rod to Harvard's Medical
school museum, and then he asked for it back in
eighteen fifty four, but the inscription is dated eighteen fifty
(26:16):
so this is all sort of in addition to being
kind of weird and misspelled. It calls into question this
uh frequent thing that you may hear about Phineas, which
is that he carried the rod around with him forever
after the accident. Clearly he did not do that, UM.
But clearly he also did want it because he asked
for it back from Harvard, so that's a little unclear
(26:38):
at this point. There's also a commemorative plaque in the
ca in Cavendish, Vermont, UH and it was unveiled on
September thirteenth, which was the fiftieth anniversary of Phineas's accident.
There's also a book called An Odd Kind of Fame,
Stories of Phineas Gage by Malcolm McMillan. It's not the
only book about him, but it came out in in
(26:59):
the r two thousand and it gives a really thorough
history of Phineas and accident um and it debunks a
lot of the popular perception of him and his life
and how he behaved afterward. So it is I think
the most thorough work on him that you can get
in one place today. Yeah, which is good because there's
a lot of mythology that's growing and I understand how
(27:20):
that happens. It's such a bizarre phenomenal thing. Yeah, it's
easy to then accept some other pretty incredible details about
the story, right well, and it's it's one of those
stories that now it's it's almost as interesting for how
it became this sort of neuroscience juggernaut as for the
actual accident that happened. So yes, fascinating And he escage
(27:44):
hundred and sixty five years ago a tamping rod had
a little accident through his entire skull. Do you also
have listener mail for our enjoyment? I do this is
from Elizabeth, and Elizabeth says, I was so excited for
your Charlie Park first podcast. I've spent many years working
in the mountains of Santa Cruz practicing forestry and timber harvesting.
(28:07):
I thought I would give you some background on the
area to add some flavor to your image of Charlie.
The Santa Cruz Mountains in the eighteen hundreds were absolutely formidable.
In California, we have mountains that to Georgia style mountains
for breakfast. The Santa Cruz Mountains are really steep. There's
random cracks in the earth from earthquakes, cliffs, and any
water course essentially has a steep inner gorge surrounding it.
(28:31):
In the winter, we get rained from about November to
April and it just rained the whole time. Even in
the modern era, roads are slick, mudflides are a huge problem,
rivers become torrents, and remote mountains homes routinely get cut
off from civilization. Add to all that, in the eighteen hundreds,
mountain lions and bears routinely roamed the area. Santa Cruz
(28:51):
has always been slightly off from the larger San Francisco
Bay to the north, and the moderate. The Montery area
was difficult to get to as well because it s
stu aries. The current main road over the hill is
referred to as Killer seventeen because it is incredibly windy, steep, narrow,
and for a long time had no median divider. Back
(29:12):
in the olden days, whips and stagecoach companies used to
find the roads and passages quote over the hill and
try to outdo each other transporting people over the rough terrain.
One of the places I worked as a road prism
that was one of these stagecoach roads and is still
a visible road cut through the woods, slide slopes of
and then randomly nice flat road. You can still drive
small truck on. One thing you forgot to mention in
(29:35):
the podcast, maybe because you were not aware that is
the reason. In fact, there was another Mountain Charlie in
the area that was maybe more famous in the Santa
Cruz area. There's even a Mount Charlie road named after him.
He was another grizzled tough whip who lost an eye
when it was swiped in a fight with a fare
Although he couldn't drive teams anywhere, he set up a
(29:57):
toll on one of his passages over the hill. Uh,
and then she sends a link to that mountain, Charlie.
So number one, thank you, Elizabeth. Um. Well, I have
not been to the Santa Cruz Mountains in particular, but
I have driven up to Lake Arrowhead in California a
couple of times for Maximum con um and it is
(30:17):
definitely a whole different experience from the Appalachian Mountains, which
I am much more used to. And what's deceptive is
that it starts out feeling a whole lot like I've
already going up to Asheville, except it it keeps going,
and it goes and goes and goes some more, and
then it keeps going and then you look down and
there's clouds under you, and it's a little alarming and weird. Um.
(30:38):
I have never driven it. I think I have driven.
I've been in a vehicle with my parents driving through it.
I remember being rather terrified. Yeah, I'm a little bit
of a nervous Nellie in the car sometimes. Well. And
the you know, if if any of you have ever
heard of maximun con it's a the Maximum Fund podcast network,
I thing that they have every year. Um. And there
(30:59):
was a lot of this shin on the forums about, Hey,
I hear this road is really terrifying to drive on.
And uh, you know, I said, I used to drive
to Asheville and back. Will I be okay? And people like, oh, yeah,
sure you'll be fine, and they were right. I mean,
I was pretty much fine, but there was this moment
when I sort of saw down how extremely high up
I was. For a brief second, you were not fine. Yeah.
(31:21):
And then last the last time that I went, I
made a wrong turn and wound up just sort of
on this road that was running along the ridge in
the mountains there for a really long time. And that
was that was definitely a little alarming. So yes, thank
you Elizabeth for writing to us. We definitely did not
hear about the other mountains Charley um in our research,
(31:43):
and it's so many great details about the area. It
really does help contextualize at all. And yeah, we pretty
much said this was terrifying, but we didn't know a
lot of terrifying tail I'm extra terrified. I while I
would like to be a lighthousekeeper, I do not want
to be a stage coach driver in the Santa Cruz Mountain. Okay,
if you would like to write to us about stage
(32:06):
coaches or crazy industrial accidents, maybe not that, or anything
else you can. We are at uh History podcast at
discovery dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot
com slash history class stuff, and on Twitter at mist
in History. You can find our tumbler at Miston History
dot tumbler dot com, and we've been pinning things about
(32:26):
our episodes and other historical stuff on Pinterest. If you
would like to learn some more about something related to
what we've talked about today, you can come to our
website and put the word lobotomy in our search bar
and you will find the article how lobotomies work. You
can learn about that and a whole lot more at
our website, which is how stuff Works dot com for
(32:50):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it
has stuff works dot com. M Audible dot com is
the leading provider of downloadable digital audio books and spoken
word entertainment. Audible has more than one thousand titles to
(33:12):
choose from to be downloaded to your iPod or MP
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