Meet Phineas Gage... Or how flickr changed our life *New photograph of Gage published!
*Another photograph of Phineas! February, 2010 - Our boy is back in the news! In July 2009, soon after we announced our identification of the daguerreotype of Phineas we learned that a descendant of Gage had a different image of him that had come down in her family. We were able to visit her in Texas and study her photograph. We felt that it was at least two generations removed from a daguerreotype portrait of Gage. It appeared to be a later copy of an earlier cabinet card copy of a daguerreotype. Since then she has been given the actual cabinet card which we hope to see soon. After our image was featured in the September Smithsonian Magazine they were contacted by a woman who is descended from a different branch of the Gage family. She also has the same original cabinet card. Although Gage wears the same waistcoat, other details in the photograph are different. We think it was made at a different time and likely by a different photographer. The photograph is reproduced in the letters section of the March issue of the Smithsonian Magazine but is not reproduced on the web site. It has been posted on the Phineas Gage page on Wikipedia. We will soon post a page on our web site Meet Phineas Gage to celebrate the discovery.
December 2009 - The January issue of the Smithsonian Magazine has an article on our Gage daguerreotype.
We have had requests for prints of the Gage daguerreotype from teachers and history buffs. We are not able to answer all the requests so we have launched the "Meet Phinias Gage Shop" on CafePress with prints, buttons, post cards, and a magnet of the Gage daguerreotype.
Thank you, Michael Spurlock for looking at an image that has been looked at by many, many people and seeing the possibilities that no one else saw! Thank you also for the comment you posted in December, 2008. It continues to be an exciting journey.
* Note that I have added a statement at the end of this description about usage.
The daguerreotype above is making a return visit to flickr after an absence of more than six months. It was first posted in December 2007 when I was a new flickr user. The title then was "Daguerreotype - One Eyed Man with Harpoon" which was what we thought it was when we acquired it over 30 years ago. There was some discussion with members of the Whaling group about the identification of the rod he is holding. It was decided that it was not likely a harpoon. What was it?
In December 2008 there was a post that sent us off in a new direction. A flickr member posted a comment "maybe you found a photo of Phineas Gage? If so, it would be the only one known." A quick Google introduced us to the bizarre life of Phineas Gage and we were hooked.
Over the last six months we have read, researched, made road trips, and contacts we never dreamed of. We have been to the Warren Anatomical Museum at the Harvard Medical School in Boston to see Gage's life mask, skull, and tamping iron. We have been to Cavendish, VT where Gage met with his fateful accident. We have corresponded and collaborated with the world's leading authority on Gage. Amazingly we have also written an article that will be published in the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences in August, 2009. We also have posted a web site Meet Phineas Gage.
If you do not know the story of Gage, his accident, and his place in medical history, we suggest to Google his name or check out the links page on our site.
We are amazed at the ability of the internet to share information. If we had not posted this image on flickr for a sharp eyed member to see, we would still be calling this "The Whaler" holding a harpoon. Thanks to flickr and to Michael Spurlock.
For several years we have had an informal business supplying images in our collection to publishers, film, and television producers for a modest fee. We often grant permission for educational and non-profit usage asking only for a credit line and, perhaps, a copy of the publication if it interests us. Check out our web page called "The Past Tense of Picture".
Comments and faves
josefnovak33, rachael8amen, reverendross, moarroar, and 187 other people added this photo to their favorites.
rachael8amen (47 months ago | reply)
holy crap. i remember phineas from psychology 101 :) he was an attractive man, who knew...congratulations on your hard work and great find!
Ruth Flickr (47 months ago | reply)
Fascinating stuff!
-Snapatorium- (47 months ago | reply)
Wow, that's impressive! How wonderful that one photo sent you on an adventure.
ookami_dou (47 months ago | reply)
This is so great!
In University and school I've talked so often about Gage and his accident.
Its so interesting to see him now.
Thanks for posting this!!!!
Maybe this is the group you're looking for?
www.flickr.com/groups/flickrdiscoveries/
Crafty Dogma (47 months ago | reply)
What a fantastic story and photo!
ART NAHPRO (47 months ago | reply)
Thank you for posting to the Astonishing Power of Flickr. Perfect.
Zmanphoto (47 months ago | reply)
Cool! I just read this in the LA Times. I didn't know it was your image until I went your website.
Photo_History (47 months ago | reply)
Zman... Wow, already in the LA times. I just sent a scan to them last night. Wonder if it is online yet.
Nope, does not seem to be posted on the LA Times site. Thanks for mentioning it. When did you see it?
Photo_History (47 months ago | reply)
Zman... Found it in a Google search! I am glad I did since I discovered that the link is to to the Phineas site but to our domain home page. I did a rush edit to several pages to put a link to Phineas on the page. I am having a lot of unusual loading issues with my sites. Wonder if it is heavy traffic or just an unrelated glitch?
Zmanphoto (47 months ago | reply)
Yea, I saw it online, not in the paper. A friend of mine sent me the link through facebook. What a great story. I would imagine you will get a bunch of hits on your webpage.
Photo_History (47 months ago | reply)
I am on hold with my hosting service. My web site is overwhelmed! We are trying to move it now.
Photo_History (47 months ago | reply)
Because of heavy traffic we had to move our site to a different server. Until it propagates in a few hours a much smoother visit to Meet Phineas Gage can be had at this link to the IP address.
Katsoulis Photography (47 months ago | reply)
No doubt your getting a huge amount of traffic. It really is a tremendous historical find! Did you save the original post history? That would be interesting to read!
KFrench Photography (47 months ago | reply)
wow, you guys are famous! I just read the story of Mr. Gage in Wikipedia (mention of this photo there too!). He lived in here in Santa Clara, CA near the end of his life, and part in San Francisco. Very cool indeed!
Admittedly I had never heard of him until now. Wow! Thanks. And I feel privileged that you are one of my contacts! ;oD
Photo_History (47 months ago | reply)
Indeed I spent all of yesterday and part of today getting the site on a server that could deal with the traffic! This was made more complex because it was so busy that we had trouble accessing the files to move them. I am now trying to answer the requests from publications for images. We are lucky that the LA Times had a bad link to the site or we may never have gotten it moved.
If you are in the Boston area we are told that there will be a story on the weekend.
I am getting some push-back on our copyright statement. We are really more concerned about reproduction rights.
msspurlock (47 months ago | reply)
Hi, I'm Michael Spurlock, the "maybe you found a photo of Phineas Gage?" poster.
Do you know when the journal containing the article will actually be available?
Photo_History (47 months ago | reply)
Thank you Michael! I am going to post your name on the web site soon. You deserve kudos for your sharp eye. The journal will be published in Mid August.
TinTrunk (47 months ago | reply)
What an incredible, unique, and historically valuable photograph. The perfect illustration of how the shared wisdom available on flickr can lead to such amazing discoveries.
Congratulations to Michael Spurlock for the perceptive tip! And congratulations to photo_history for pursuing it so rigourously and thoroughly. Your website is a great introduction to Phineas Gage's story.
Home and Heart (46 months ago | reply)
Absolutely fascinating!!!
PhineasGageReserach (46 months ago | reply)
Researchers such as Malcolm Macmillan and I hope readers can contribute to a fuller picture of Phineas Gage by helping with topics such as those listed below. Many are not on Gage directly, but rather people or places related to him. For more information including how these relate to Phineas, please visit www.deakin.edu.au/hmnbs/psychology/gagepage/P gQuestn.php .
Information might be in letters and diaries; medical and business records; town, police and court files; local newspapers; and archives of churches, hospitals and literary, professional, historical and genealogical societies. We especially hope organizations will search their one-of-a-kind materials not published in book form.
IN CHILE (1852-60): We want to know about Drs. William and Henry Trevitt, Masonic lodges, Methodist churches, and English-language newspapers, schools and businesses. Do you know anyone who can help with such things?
IN NEW ENGLAND (1848-54): Can you find newspaper or diary accounts of Phineas’ accident, of his travels exhibiting himself and his “iron,” or of his reported preaching at Methodist revivals in Sterling, Mass.? In Concord, NH records of the Abbot-Downing coachworks could identify “three enterprising New Englanders” who may have set up the coach line for which Phineas drove in Chile; in Hanover you might discover Phineas’ duties at Currier’s Inn, or a Dartmouth professor who met him; and somewhere in Wilton may be the papers of Henry Trevitt.
IN CALIFORNIA (1860- ): Where is the missing undertaker’s ledger showing where Gage died? What can you discover about Dr. William Jackson Wentworth (Alameda Co.) or the papers of Joseph Stalder (d.1931)? Are you descended from Phineas’s nieces/nephew Hannah, Delia, Mary, Alice, or Frank B.Shattuck? Can we learn more about Frank at the School for the Deaf?
IN OHIO (1860- ): Can you find anything about Henry Trevitt’s time at Starling Medical College in Columbus, Prof. J.W. Hamilton, or William Trevitt’s papers?
ANYWHERE: If you are related to the Cowdrey, Davis, Ames, or Kimball families, are you also related to Phineas’ doctor, John Martyn Harlow? Do you know of ship passenger lists (Boston, New York, Chile, Panama, S.F.) that might show Gage family movements? Do you have Gold Rush ancestors who stopped in Valparaiso, Chile? And of course, letters mentioning Gage could have gone anywhere.
There are more clues in Stillwater and Northfield, MN; Santa Clara, San Rafael, and S.F., CA; Cavendish, Castleton, Woodstock, and Burlington, VT; Lebanon and Enfield, NH; Albany, NY, Buda, IL, the National Library of Medicine, and other places. At www.deakin.edu.au/hmnbs/psychology/gagepage/P gQuestn.php are details on how you can help by following such clues. Your help or inquiries to malcolm.macmillan@unimelb.edu.au will be very much appreciated.
We would be pleased to assist teachers (in New England, S.F., even Chile?) in creating a class project involving students’ search for family papers or local lore about Gage.
Matthew L. Lena (Boston, Mass.)
lauralemur (life is upsidedown right now) (46 months ago | reply)
This is tremendously exciting! What an important discovery, all across the fields of neurology, psychology, history, photography, and more...wow! I am facinated by the collaborative process involved here (Michael Spurlock - much respect and admiration for your sharp eye and keen mind!), both on Flickr and certainly in the field...Photo_history, your tireless efforts to research this are to be commended. What an especially stunning and rare piece of history to have unearthed in your extensive and already historically/artistically important collection - a true treasure amongst gems. I am eagerly awaiting the reading of the journal article. Congrats!!!!!
Rick Scully (46 months ago | reply)
Now I am curious to find out if the Gage Road in my town in Vermont has any connection to Phineas' family. There are Gages buried in the East Bethel cemetery at the bottom of the road. It is a bit far from Cavendish (about an hour), but I am curious nonetheless.
Photo_History (46 months ago | reply)
Terrapin, I have a link to a site with the genealogy of the Gage family. I'll look for it and post it. It might answer your question.
Kate the Archivist (46 months ago | reply)
Amazing story! Great example of how valuable Flickr can be for identifying historic images. I just wrote about it on my blog at: www.archivesnext.com/?p=320 If I need to correct anything or you have anything to add, just let me know.
Photo_History (46 months ago | reply)
Kate, Your blog entry needs no correction. Thanks for the link.
karindalziel (46 months ago | reply)
Do you still have a link to the original post & comment? The story seems incomplete without it.
Photo_History (46 months ago | reply)
The original post and comments are not still on flickr. We deleted the picture while we were doing our research and that took the comments with it. I did copy them off but I am not sure about reposting them.
SylvieLeBars (46 months ago | reply)
Extraordinaire :-)
karindalziel (46 months ago | reply)
@photo_history: aww, that's too bad. You could have just taken the photo private while doing research. Ah well, hindsight and all...
Photo_History (46 months ago | reply)
I did not know about making it private at the time I removed it. We wanted to finish our research without a lot of attention before we made any claims about the identification.
Sus@nne (46 months ago | reply)
This is really exciting, I've ever so often read about him in my psychology courses. It's great to see what he really looked like and it opens up for a whole new debate, thoughts and discussions. Great! :-)
Piedmont Fossil (46 months ago | reply)
WOW, What a find!
PhotosNormandie (46 months ago | reply)
Congrats to you and to Michael Spurlock.
A nice crowdsourcing story.
Just wrote a note about it in French on my blog :
blog.tuquoque.com/post/2009/08/01/Connaissez- vous-Phineas...
msspurlock (46 months ago | reply)
For what it's worth, I wonder how regional these frames were and how common they were. There seem to be so many different types. Notice the similarity to the border on the "Liberty" tintype in your collection, possibly made in a New York studio, to the one around Phineas. There's probably no guarantee the frames weren't added later, I suppose. I mean, maybe it wasn't even the practice to buy the frame at the same time? And obviously, the subjects are four or five decades apart. But then, like most things in the 19th and early 20th centuries, companies not only kept the same plates and molds for decades, they sold them back and forth. Still, it's an interesting subject. To me, anyway. :-)
Anyone know of a good photographic reference book on that topic? I'm curious to know where photographers and their subjects back then got their frames.
Photo_History (46 months ago | reply)
Michael, Photographic supplies were sold from catalogs and most mats and cases were widely available. Some of the best known and most successful photographers had mats and cases that were unique and marked with their name.
An added problem is that daguerreotypes were made in standard sizes and it was not unusual for families in the past or later collectors to replace a damaged or out of style case with a different one.
I will get together a short list of reference books to suggest to you.
msspurlock (46 months ago | reply)
Thanks!
Sounds about as random a distribution as I feared, though. I was kind of hoping that forty or fifty years before Sears and Roebuck, and that kind of mail order availability, it might be more localized, so a person could at least trace a design to one coast or the other, or even another country. Or maybe find a time scale, so the length of time it had been framed might be estimated. It does look like later frames, so it probably is newer than the image itself. Certainly I know in my family we've done that once or twice.
lannig94 (43 months ago | reply)
pour les francophones , quelques explications trouvées sur LE MONDE (grand quotidien français) :
www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2009/10/23/un- siecle-et-de...
Très étonnant cette histoire et cette photo.
Photo_History (43 months ago | reply)
Yes, I just read the internet translation of the Le Mond article. My french is not good enough and the internet translation, as always, is somewhat strange but I get the idea. It seems they based it on an incorrect early press story that we were in Massachusetts.
The early media frenzy has died down but we still get requests from publishers and teachers for files.
lannig94 (43 months ago | reply)
I don't speak english but I tried to translate the entry of Le Monde with the help of the website "Reverso" :
One and a half century later, Phineas Gage finds a face
One and a half century later, Phineas Gage finds a face
What man became Phineas Gage ( 1823-1860 ) after his accident? Described as was intolerable made more irritable still by a face henceforth disgusting? Did he remain on the contrary attractive in spite of his unique eye, and rather adapted - with the exception of the last months of his life in the course of which he was a victim of grave epileptic fits? Since about twenty years, the neuropsychologists privilege the first hypothesis. But the recent on-line publishing, on the site of sharing of photos Flickr, the only image known for this American could lead to revise the legend.
On September 13th, 1848, this young foreman of the New England worked on a construction site of railroad of the Vermont. The rock exploded accidentally, and the jumper which he held the hand pierced him of the cheek at the top of the skull, crossing the part(party) before of its brain before falling again some meters farther. Surviving contrary to all expectations this terrible wound, Gage showed fast to have lost nothing of its intellectual faculties or its memories. The story (based for the main part on the report that made it, twenty years later, the doctor Harlow, who had taken care of him) tells however that the man was never the same.
Unpredictable and unrefined, making opposite decisions in his interests, he would so have lived a disconnected and more and more miserable life. For the neurobiologist Antonio Damasio (university of California of the South, Los Angeles), who made it a central case of its researches, Phineas Gage's transformation results from the fact that he would have lost the sense of the good and the evil, and the intellectual capacity to feel feelings.
We were there, when a couple of collectors of photos of the Massachusetts, Jack and Beverly Wilgus, deposited on Flickr this image opposite, entitled: " Daguerreotype - with One Eyed Man Harpoon ". " We had baptized it " the Whaler ", because we thought that he held a harpoon ", they tell. In December, 2008, an informed Internet user left on the page this comment :
" Maybe you found Phineas Gage's photo? If it was the case, it would be the only known photo. " Wilgus, immediately, dashed into the investigation. Described in August in the Newspaper of the History of the Neurosciences, the identification of Gage was established thanks to the mask realized in his lifetime, preserved to the Warren Anatomical Museum of Boston. His features correspond exactly to those of the photo. Also for writings registered on the bar preserved in the same museum.
Of this meeting in two centuries of distance between technologies - the daguerreotype and Internet-, the foreman thus gained a face... And it is not the one of a deformed and fallen man. An image is certainly only an image, and we ignore quite circumstances in which this one was realized. But his rediscovery will not miss to be all grist for the mill of those who, such the psychologist Malcolm Macmillan (Deakin university, Australia), support for years that the "case" Phineas Gage was maybe overestimated.
Le Monde 23 octobre 2009 Catherine Vincent
On The Web : brightbytes.com/phineasgage.
GiS:: (42 months ago | reply)
Muito interessante! bela coleção!
pennylrichardsca (42 months ago | reply)
Hi, I'm an admin for a group called Disability History, and we'd love to have this added to the group!
Allister-C (41 months ago | reply)
I was reading about this in Smithsonian! i decided to get on and try and find it! the story is so cool! Congradulations!
msspurlock (41 months ago | reply)
Steve Twomey is an excellent writer, who really knows how to tell a story.
His other articles for Smithsonian are equally good.
Of course, I'm partial to this one. :-)
Photo_History (41 months ago | reply)
Michael, I am so glad that Steve Twomey gave you credit for seeing what so many people missed.
I made a comment several days ago on the website about the question of lateral reversal but it never posted. I did it again today so may end up with duplicate comments if there is a long time between submitting and posting. Both the published article and the web article have a caption explaining why but several people seem to have missed it.
Thanks again for your original flick comment.
Olyspix (41 months ago | reply)
Hi, Wilgus's !
What a "kick" finding you in Smithsonian.
-Erik Ohlson, son of Red Ohlson, of the C.A.P.S. group there in Baltimore, now living in northern California.
Photo_History (41 months ago | reply)
Erik, We remember your father well! We were new photographic collectors when we met him at one of the founding meetings for CAPS. We still have a cigaret lighter with his studio logo in our photographic advertising collections. It is great to hear from you.
As I have mentioned here we have just moved to Texas. One of my resolves is to get the archive I have of CAPS material in order although the group is no longer active and I am not sure anyone is still interested. I am sure I have photographs of your father in the newsletters and on the web site I posted. Would you like for me to send scans of them on to you if I find them?
Best wishes for the New Year! Beverly
Olyspix (41 months ago | reply)
Hi, nice to hear from you - now that you're famous ;-)
I actually may have had some of those old newsletters. If any pics are particularly good, it might indeed be interesting, but don't "strain yourself".
You're in Texas, I'm in California. I suppose we all move on.
In a way, I am living his (Eskil's) dream: my one daughter manages a small winery near here - south of San Jose.(Kirigin Cellars). My dad tried so hard to grow wine grapes on our place in Severna Park, but the humidity defeated them. Now, of a summer's evening, we sit out in the vinyards with a glass of fine red and watch the sunsets over the Uvas Canyon. BTW - This daughter has finally produced a great-granddaughter.
His other granddaugter works for the department of health in Hobart, Tasmania, where she has her citizenship, and husband. Her flickr account is: www.flickr.com/photos/cragg-ohlsson/ if you are interested - she is becoming quite a photographer.
She recently suffered a miscarriage and "is not receiving condolances", so I would not contact her at this time.
verybigjen (41 months ago | reply)
saw this in Smithsonian, wanted to pass on my
congrats as another who used flickr to solve
a historical puzzle. (in my case a mourning
pendant of a Tory Reverened in Revolutionary
era Maine and and amazingly sad tale.)
felixtcat (41 months ago | reply)
very cool, what a contribution to science and history!
Camera.Ed (40 months ago | reply)
I just read a post form NPR about Gage. Wow, its so cool that your photo got recognized for who it is. Contrats on owning such a wonderful piece of history.