This review is one of my favourites from my nthposition days. The book itself is a salutary reminder of how the story of cience, too, is full of legends and just-so stories. And in the years since I wrote this, the rise of the TED talk and viral video and clickbait Easy Answer To All questions renders Macdonald’s work near prophetic
This piece is no longer actively on nthposition. Fortunately I had previously preserved a copy on a precursor of this blog, with an entertaining typo in the heading.
I ended up having some correspondence with Macmillan subsequently – specifically about the lyrics to the Slackdaddy song (although I don’t think he like the word “primly”) His book is availble here. I think this book marked a point where I began to exhibit a certain reserve and scepticism about similarly pat, anecdotal stories.
I find that Jackson Beatty’s book seems to be rather obscure – one of the textbooks from my medical education that was perhaps less directly helpful in getting me through exams but did help provide a good quote illustrating the Official Version of Gage’s story.
Review of “An Odd KinD of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage” by Malcolm Macmillan
At 4.30pm on 13 September 1848, the foreman…
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Séamus Sweeney 