Phineas Gage
Phineas Gage
Phineas P. Gage (July 9?, 1823 – May 21, 1860) was a railroad construction foreman now remembered for his incredible survival of an accident in which a large iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying one or both of his brain’s frontal lobes, and for that injury’s reported effects on his personality and behavior—effects said to be so profound that friends saw him as “no longer Gage.”
Long known as “the American crowbar case”—once termed “the case which more than all others is calculated to excite our wonder, impair the value of prognosis, and even to subvert our physiological doctrines” —Phineas Gage influenced 19th century thinking about the brain and the localization of its functions, and was perhaps the first case suggesting that damage to specific regions of the brain might affect personality and behavior.
Gage is a fixture in the curricula of neurology, psychology and related disciplines, and is frequently mentioned in books and academic papers; he also has a minor place in popular culture. Relative to this celebrity, the body of known fact about the case is remarkably small, so that historically it has been cited in support of mutually incompatible theories of the brain. A survey of accounts of the case has found that even modern scientific presentations are often exaggerated and distorted in significant ways, frequently contradicting the established facts.
Discovery of a daguerreotype portrait of Gage—”handsome…well dressed and confident, even proud,” and holding the tamping iron which injured him—was announced in July 2009 (see right). One researcher points to it as consistent with a “social recovery” hypothesis, under which Gage’s most serious mental changes may have existed for only a limited time after the accident, so that in later life he was much more functional, and socially much better adapted, than has been thought.
Albert Kahn Photograph collection
Albert Kahn, born at Marmoutier, Bas-Rhin, France on March 3, 1860, died at Boulogne-Billancourt, Seine, France on the night of November 14, 1940, was a banker and French philanthropist.
He was born into a Jewish family, one of 5 children of his parents, Louis and Babette Kahn.
In 1879 he became a bank clerk in Paris but studied for a degree in the evenings. His tutor was Henri Bergson who remained his friend all his life. He graduated in 1881 and continued to mix in intellectual circles making friends with Auguste Rodin and Mathurin Méheut.
In 1892 he became a principal associate of the Goudchaux Bank which was regarded as one of most important financial houses of Europe.
In 1893 he acquired a large property in Boulogne-Billancourt where he established a unique garden containing a variety of garden styles including English, Japanese, a rose garden and a conifer wood. This became a meeting place for French and European intelligentsia until the 1930s when due to the wall street crash Kahn became bankrupt, the garden was turned into a public park in which Kahn would still take walks. Kahn died during the Nazi occupation and so escaped deportation.
In 1909 Kahn travelled to Japan on business and returned with many photographs of the journey. This prompted him to begin a project collecting a photographic record of the entire Earth. He appointed Jean Brunhes as the project director and sent photographers to every continent to record images of the planet using the first colour photography, autochrome plates, and early cinematography. Between 1909 and 1931 they collected 72,000 colour photographs and 183,000 meters of film. These form a unique historical record of 50 countries, known as “The Archives of the Planet”.
Kahn’s photographers began documenting France in 1914, just days before the outbreak of World War I, and by liaising with the military managed to record both the devastation of war, and the struggle to continue everyday life and agricultural work.
He also promoted education at the highest level through travelling scholarships.
The economic crisis of the Great Depression ruined Kahn and put an end to his project.
Since 1986 the photographs have been collected into a museum at 14, Rue du Port, Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris, at the site of his garden. It is now a French national museum and includes four hectares of gardens, as well as the museum which houses his historic photographs and film.
These and many more images have been published in “The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn”
Got to www.albertkahn.co.uk for more information and images.
Past-Present MashUp of the WW2 Leningrad Siege
Russian photographer Sergei Larenkov created a set of MashUp-photographs using historical photographs from the WW2 Leningrad siege and photographs from today being taken at the same location.
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