eat patients.” UNLIKELY CASES HAVE AN eminent history in medi- cine. The modern science of the mind owes a lot to the freakish accident suffered by Phineas Gage, a 19th century railroad construction foreman whose job involved packing down explosive powder with a three-and-a-half-foot-long iron tamping rod.

eat patients." UNLIKELY CASES HAVE AN eminent history in medi- cine. The modern science of the mind owes a lot to the freakish accident suffered by Phineas Gage, a 19th century railroad construction foreman whose job involved packing down explosive powder with a three-and-a-half-foot-long iron tamping rod.

ruggled to make sense of it, until it dawned on them that these were the same brain regions described in a famous psychiatric case study. In 1848, Phineas Gage, an American railroad worker, was impaled through the skull by a 43-inch-long tamping iron when the explosives he was working with went off prematu