A yard-long pole was launched through the eye socket of 25 year old railroad worker Phineas Gage, grazing his brain and exiting through the top of his skull. Now I know what you’re thinking, “man that was really morbid”; if something like this happened to you during this time frame, you’d be loaded with placebos, no surgery, trauma room, or anesthesia. This reality was the case for Gage, a grim truth that expanded our understanding of the mind. The development of modern medicine comes from a history of understanding illness; to learn how to treat the body, we learned about what caused injury, including to our brains. However, the study of neurological trauma provided a window into the mind; observing how physical injury changed body function and behavior made it easier to diagnose. These forced us to evolve our healthcare program, inventing medical instruments, mapping out the body, and refining disease theories.
September 1848, while working on a construction site, a long metal pole was driven through Gage’s eye socket; even so, he felt little to no pain. While this was odd, the most peculiar part was his personality; the pole grazing his brain caused a permanent personality change. Prior to the accident, he was described as a smart business man with a balanced mind, but following the incident, he was irritable and easily aggravated, becoming violent at times. His personality change was a complete phenomenon, surprising a number of professionals; they described him as “no longer Gage.” During this time, most would say they had been possessed by an evil force, using circumstantial and skeptic evidence. As strange as it was to the professionals of the time, this evidence confirmed the idea regions of the brain affect personality and behavior.
1861 to 1865, the Civil War introduced advancements in warfare, and to combat these technological advancements in healthcare. The more war weapons created, the more we had to develop medicine to ensure soldiers wouldn’t die upon reaching the battle field. Over half of the soldiers around you died or were injured from puncture or cranial injuries from gun powder fragments and bullets lodged into their heads. What made this situation worse was the lack of general knowledge about Germ Theory; a number of unsterilized surgeries were performed outside, injuries even left unmended, truly demonstrating how little they knew. Anyone today would say this was completely unacceptable and rather be left untreated than risk this, but it was just the norm for this time. When 1898 rolled around, the Spanish American War was what finally introduced the concept of contamination and controlling disease spread. Surgeons began sterilizing themselves and surgical tools, leading to a drastic decrease in post operation infectious deaths, getting better but not perfect.
Following the early 1860s, the belief that disease could be air born was solidified as Germ Theory, becoming one of the most important revelations in medical history. Finally, we’re talking; by proving that microorganisms were responsible for thousands of deaths, physicians were able to make more than an educated guess, they could actually diagnose you. Speeding through to a period of sanitation to the late 1800’s, the building blocks for modern microbiological and neurological studies formed. Doing more than proving why people who got treated continued getting sick, it was a turning point on how we looked at controlling illness. 1895 introduced the first x-ray machine developed by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen; using a sheet of paper covered in barium platinocyanide, he could see through objects, getting us a look inside the body, making it possible to prevent before diagnosing. All these tools and ideas developed over time have made the technology we have today possible, it was revolutionary then and it still is now simply because humans are prone to injury.
