Phineas Gage and the iron rod
An iron rod went through his head; he was talking within minutes
Blasting rock for a railway, 25-year-old foreman Phineas Gage had a metre-long iron rod driven clean through his skull. He survived, was talking within minutes and lived almost 12 more years, and his case became an early lesson in how the frontal lobes shape personality.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 19th century
Did you know
Phineas Gage carried around the iron rod that had gone through his head. The 6 kg bar stayed with him for the rest of his life, and now it is displayed beside his skull in a Harvard medical museum. Share →
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Europe
- 1839 Birth of photography: the daguerreotype — 9 years earlier
- 1845–1852 Great Famine in Ireland — 3 years earlier
- 1848–1849 Revolutions of 1848 — same year
- 1848 The Communist Manifesto — same year
- 1861 Unification of Italy — 13 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1853–1856 Crimean War — 5 years later
- 1861 Emancipation of the serfs in Russia — 13 years later
- 1867 Alaska Purchase — 19 years later
- 1869 Tolstoy's War and Peace — 21 years later
Middle East
- 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay — 20 years earlier
- 1839 The Edict of Gülhane opens the Tanzimat — 9 years earlier
- 1839–1842 First Anglo-Afghan War — 9 years earlier
Africa
- c. 1835–1846 The Great Trek — 13 years earlier
- 1847 Liberia declares independence — 1 year earlier
- 1869 Opening of the Suez Canal — 21 years later
Asia
- c. 1831 Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa — 17 years earlier
- 1839–1842 First Opium War — 9 years earlier
- 1850–1864 Taiping Rebellion — 2 years later
- 1853–1854 Commodore Perry's Black Ships — 5 years later
- 1868 Meiji Restoration — 20 years later
Oceania
- 1851 The Australian gold rushes — 3 years later
Alive at the time
- Charles Darwin (aged 39)
- Abraham Lincoln (aged 39)
- Karl Marx (aged 30)
- Queen Victoria (aged 29)
- Fyodor Dostoevsky (aged 27)
- Leo Tolstoy (aged 20)
- Dmitri Mendeleev (aged 14)
- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (aged 8)
- Thomas Edison (aged 1)
- Katsushika Hokusai (aged 88)