The skull and rod can now be seen by anyone in Boston, in the museum of the Harvard Medical Institute. After some deliberation, they agreed with good-natured amicability to this unusual request. My grandfather asked that Gage’s coffin be opened and that he should take possession of the skull that had suffered so sorely. My grandfather heard of his death only five years later, for as you know, we were sorely tried during those troublesome times.Īt that point he addressed Gage’s sister and her husband by letter. The fateful iron rod was placed in his coffin. The young man who had once excited such high hopes had become a social reject who brought shame to his family.īefore he turned forty, Gage perished in an epileptic fit. It is said that he spent most of his time drinking copiously. Gage moved to San Francisco to live with his sister and her husband, a successful merchant. In the 60s, Phineas Gage’s health began rapidly to decline, in consequence of both epileptic fits that appeared as late consequences of the accident and his miserable way of life. His iron rod, from which Gage was never separated, he showed to the audience with obvious pride. He had his head shaved over the scar so that his misshapen skull was clearly to be seen, and at every performance he gave a detailed account of the accident. He appeared in New York at the Barnum museum in the company of the world’s largest-chinned man, the world’s fattest woman and a young man with skin like an elephant. Some years later Gage took a job with a circus.
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