John Martyn Harlow

John Martyn Harlow (1819 to 1907) was an American physician, born in Whitehall, New York, on 25 November 1819, who is remembered chiefly for attending the brain-injury survivor Phineas Gage and for his published reports on Gage's accident and later history. He graduated MD from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia in 1844 and practised in Cavendish, Vermont, where Gage's accident occurred in 1848. His first paper on Gage appeared in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in late 1848, and in 1868 he published a final paper that traced what he had learned of Gage's wanderings and presented the psychological changes that presumably followed the injury; Gage had died in 1860 and Harlow had obtained his skull for the paper. From 1861 he practised in Woburn, Massachusetts, where he served on town committees and as a state senator, and he left most of his wealth to charity. The New York Times called him one of the oldest and most prominent physicians and surgeons of New England.