10 People Who Survived Gruesome Accidents Against All The Odds

On Spetember the 13th, 1848, a cheery man by the name of Phineas Gage was blasting rock out of the way for a brand new railway. He was poking dynamite down a hole with a long, pointed metal pole (just the tool for the job) when the pole struck the rock and caused a spark, setting off the dynamite.

The explosion threw Gage into the air, and the pole, straight through Gage's head. It entered the skull through his left eye socket and exited out of the top of his head. Gage came thudding back down to earth where he lay motionless and the pole was found some 80 feet (25 m) away, "smeared with blood and brain" (yum).

A few minutes later, however, Gage got up and spoke and within thirty minutes he was sat calmly outside a doctor's office. When the doctor arrived, Gage turned to him and said "Doctor, here is business enough for you", thus winning the award for biggest understatement of the century and causing the doc to almost pass out from the sight of his "pulsating brain". At one point during his examination, Phineas got up and vomited and "the effort of vomiting pressed out about half a teacupful of the brain, which fell upon the floor".

After the accident, it is said that Gage's personality changed and he became moody and aggressive whereas, once, he had been cheerful and friendly. It is this that has caused Phineas Gage to literally become a textbook example for millions of psychology students studying the effects and function of the frontal lobe of the brain.