Lessons of the brain: the Phineas Gage case

 The story of Phineas Gage illustrates some of the first medical knowledge gained on the relationship between personality and the functioning of the brain's frontal lobe. A construction foreman from Vermont, Gage survived an accident while laying railroad tracks, during which a 13-pound tamping iron blew straight through his head.

Gage’s skull, along with the tamping iron that bore through it, are two of the approximately 15,000 artifacts and case objects conserved at the Warren Anatomical Museum, which is a part of the Center for the History of Medicine in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard