LARS'S LIBRARY: MY REVIEW OF JOHN FLEISCHMAN'S "PHINEAS GAGE: A GRUESOME BUT TRUE STORY ABOUT BRAIN SCIENCE"

PHINEAS GAGE: A GRUESOME BUT TRUE STORY ABOUT BRAIN SCIENCE. By John Fleischman. Houghton Mifflin, 2002. 96 pages.

John Fleischman opens Phineas Gage at full tilt, September 13, 1848, "a minute or two away" from an accident that can only be described as freakish. Gage was working with gunpowder, blasting through solid rock as the foreman of a railroad construction gang in Vermont.

The tool of his trade was a tamping iron, three and a half feet long, a little less than two inches round, one end pointed like a spear to set a fuse, the blunt end used to tamp down earth over the gunpowder.

Something went wrong. The sharp end of the iron spear shot into Gage’s left cheek. Its entire length rocketed through the front of his brain and burst out of the top of his skull, clanking down thirty feet away.

Gage lived. During the half hour it took for a doctor to arrive, he sat down on the front porch of the hotel where he was boarding and talked about what had just happened.

Was he okay? Not exactly. Phineas Gage was not the same man. He could walk and talk, but the even-tempered supervisor had now lost the ability to match his behavior to the situation at hand. He had no social skills.

Gage’s misfortune occurred as the medical establishment was on the verge of looking at the brain in an utterly new way. A decade and a half later, a surgeon in Paris showed, by conducting autopsies on stroke victims, that there was a specific region of the brain devoted to speech production. That place, located just above the left ear, is still known as Broca’s area, after the French doctor.

It has taken another century plus for neuroscientists, equipped with modern technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalography, to really begin to map out the brain. Today, when lay people are knowledgeable about "executive function," it’s far easier for us to understand how losing a chunk of your frontal lobe would affect your judgment, your planning, and the way you get along with others.

In the mid-nineteenth century, phrenologists were feeling the bumps and dents on people’s heads to determine cognitive strengths and weaknesses.

What doctors of the time were able to do was dig up poor old Phineas and preserve his skull, as well as the tamping iron that remained a constant companion until his death in 1860, at the age of thirty-six. This ensured that Gage would remain a subject of fascination, and become the protagonist of Fleischman’s unusual and compelling children’s book.

The only thing that bugged me about Fleischman’s otherwise riveting narration was his insistence on using present tense throughout the book. It worked for me in the initial passage, so forceful in its immediacy, but got hokier as he went through several time changes. But that never bothered me enough to lose interest. What a story, and thanks to Elizabeth Bird for bringing it to my attention.

Many of us are attracted, perhaps somewhat reluctantly, to the macabre and grotesque, including middle schoolers. Here’s a nifty book that plays into that draw, and then introduces readers to the exciting work being done in brain science.

Recommended for fifth graders on up.