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An injury with an improbable outcome that occurred to a to a railway foreman on 13 September 1848 had an influence on the science of localisation of brain function. Phineas Gage was the foreman of a railway construction crew working just outside Cavendish, Vermont. He was the company's most capable foreman with a well balanced mind and shrewd business sense.
Gage was tamping an explosion charge. A tamping iron is a crowbar-like tool used to compact an explosive charge into the bottom of a borehole. The tamping iron used by Gage was 43 inches in length, 1.25 inches in diameter at one end, tapering over a distance of 12 inches to a diameter of 0.25 inches at the other end, and weighing about 13 pounds.Tamping involves packing of a charge into as small a space as possible at the point chosen for the explosion. An accidental explosion of the charge Phineas Gage had just set blew his tamping iron out of the borehole and through the left side of his skull. It entered a point first under his left...