Anyone who’s taken psychology brain-and-behaviour courses has probably come across the gruesome case of Phineas Gage. In 1848, Gage, a 25-year-old Vermont railroad worker, was using a three-foot tamping iron to pack blasting powder in rock. The powder prematurely ignited, sending the 13-pound iron firing up into his cheek and through his brain, exiting from his frontal cortex. (See an animated illustration here.) Gage not only survived this horrifying accident, but was lucid and chatty on the way to the hospital, and his normalcy was later exhibited to amazed doctors. He died 11 years later.

The standard trope was then that Gage immediately started to show unpleasant personality changes due to his brain damage. The psych textbooks seemed to revel in Gage’s bad behaviour, pointing out how he became quarrelsome, alcoholic, neglectful of his appearance, choleric and unemployable. Interestingly, there is now controversy over whether these personality changes actually were as severe as has been quoted in textbooks. Certainly the fact that he managed to travel extensively and hold down jobs, one of them driving long-distance stagecoaches, suggests that if he did have personality changes they were not long-lasting or severe in nature.

Daguerreotype from the collection of Jack and Beverly Wilgus

In 2007 Jack and Beverly Wilgus, a couple from Maryland, posted on Flickr a favourite photo that they had owned for several decades. It was a daguerreotype from the mid-1800s showing a dapper gent missing an eye, and posing with an odd, pointed object. They posited that the gent was an injured whaler with his harpoon, but were quickly disabused of that notion by commenters. The name Phineas Gage kept coming up, and intrigued, the Wilguses compared the photo to pictures of a lifecast made of Gage:

Lifemask (often incorrectly referred to as a deathmask) and skull of Gage

The pictures matched up perfectly, and if that weren’t enough evidence, on the object in their photo you could read part of the inscription that was known to be written on Gage’s actual tamping iron, “This is the bar that was shot through the head of Mr. Phineas P. Gage.” (Wilgus’s Phineas Gage website)

Though it’s hard to tell personality from a vintage photo—where people had to hold their pose for many seconds—one would like to think that this hale, assured-looking young man was not the profane wastral that he has been painted as through history.