Phineas Gage Essay

Ulysses S. Grant lived an interesting life. He gave so much to this country. His life was

Themes of hope, success, and wealth overpower The Great Gatsby, leaving the reader with a new way to look at the roaring twenties, showing that not everything was good in this era. F. Scott Fitzgerald creates the characters in this book to live and recreate past memories and relationships. This was evident with Gatsby and Daisy’s relationship, Tom and Daisy’s struggling marriage, and Gatsby expecting so much of Daisy and wanting her to be the person she once was. The theme of this novel is to acknowledge the past, but do not recreate and live in the past because then you will not be living in the present, taking advantage of new opportunities.

Neurologist Antonio Damasio has written significantly on Gage and other patients that he studied on with similar injuries. Damasio viewed Gage's case as playing a crucial role in the history of neuroscience, and stated that Gage's story "was the historical beginnings of the study of the biological basis of behavior". Gage's case inspired the development of frontal lobotomy, which now is a psychosurgical procedure that leads to emotional response and personality traits. On the other hand, historical analysis doesn't support this claim because Gage's injury didn't have enough influence on the development of this practice.

“It’s a shallow life that doesn’t give a person a few scars”. This quote said by Garrison Keillor, metaphorically exemplifies the true meaning of hollowness and shallowness. Hollowness and shallowness were a major part of people’s characteristics in the 1920’s ‘easy money’ era because of the great economic boom. During this era, people earned their money by corruption with smuggling alcohol during prohibition. In addition, people earned their money by people unknowingly investing in major stocks. A few people earned their money with hard work; it was mostly made easily for them. Throughout the novel, The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the shallowness and hollowness of the upper class is persistently shown. Hollowness and

The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a story about a wealthy man named Gatsby. Gatsby lives a luxuriant life in West Egg of New York. Gatsby’s wealth has an unknown secret because nobody seems to know where his wealth emerged from. Despite of having so much fortune, Gatsby’s true American dream has not been achieved. In the great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald develops Gatsby as a failed American dream to show the impossibility of the American dream in the 1920’s.

“Gage did, according to Harlow, retain “full possession of his reason” after the accident, but his wife and other people close to him soon began to notice dramatic changes in his personality” (Constandi, 2006). Brain injury can often cause this type of personality change. It has been documented in many different cases. “ However, post-injury personality changes also meant that we dealt with bouts of intense anger, confusion, and unpredictable behavior” (Cromer, 2012). These types of personality can differ, however they are usually negative. This was seen in the case of Phineas Gage. Sadly his personality and temperament wasn’t the only thing that changed. Before the accident he was considered as one of the best workers on the job site (Constandi, 2006). However, after the injury, he could hardly work. (Constandi, 2006). “His contractors, who regarded him as the most efficient and capable foreman in their employ previous to his injury, considered the change in his mind so marked that they could not give him his place again. He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint of advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinent, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operation, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. In this regard, his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was ‘no longer Gage.’” (Constandi, 2006). He sadly resorted to using his injury as an attraction to make money. He began traveling to do appearances so that people could see the injury and pay him for the “entertainment” (Constandi, 2006). He even decided to join up with the circus for a short period of time

Ulysses S. Grant       On April 27, 1822 a boy was born to Jesse Root Grant and Hannah Simpson Grant in the small town of Point Pleasant, Ohio. They named their son Hiram Ulysses Grant. In 1823 the family moved to a town nearby called Georgetown, Ohio, where Ulysses’ father owned a tannery and some farmland. Grant had two brothers and three sisters born in Georgetown.

Ulysses S. Grant was an American general and 18th president of the United States. Grant was born in Point Pleasant, Ohio, on April 27, 1822, the son of Hannah Simpson and Jesse Grant, the owner of a tannery. Taken to nearby Georgetown at the age of one, he was educated in local and boarding schools. In 1839, under the name of Ulysses Simpson instead of his original Hiram Ulysses, he was appointed to West Point. Graduating 21st in a class of 39 in 1843, he was assigned to Jefferson Barracks, Missouri. There he met Julia Dent, a local planter's daughter, whom he married after the Mexican War.

     American General and 18th President of the United States of America, Ulysses S. Grant, was a master war strategist who won the first major Union victories during the Civil War; however, political leadership proved to be far different from military leadership for Grant. While in office from 1869-1877 Grant scarcely attempted to control events, made injudicious appointments to public office, and had official corruption taint his administration, although Grant himself was never said to be actually have been involved in this corruption.

“Is Tom most responsible for Gatsby’s death? Daisy? Myrtle? Gatsby himself? Give reasons why or why not each character is implicated in the murder.”

Thesis: The pursuit of the American Dream is a dominant theme throughout The Great Gatsby, which is carried out in various ways by F. Scott Fitzgerald, how the author represents this theme through his characters and their actions is one small aspect of it.

The 1920s is the decade in American history known as the “roaring twenties.” Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is a reflection of life in the 1920s. Booming parties, prominence, fresh fashion trends, and the excess of alcohol are all aspects of life in the “roaring twenties.”

The injury sent a three-and-a-half foot-long tamping iron into his head, shattering his upper jaw and destroying his left ventromedial frontal cortex. Phineas Gage recovered from his brain injury, but his personality underwent a dramatic change described by those who knew him as a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde transformation. In more modern times we have seen similar results from brain injuries with Antonio Damasio, who had his left and right orbit and lower mesial cortices, including the prefrontal area, removed due to cancer. While he recovered from the surgery, his personality, like Phineas Gage’s underwent a dramatic change and his ability to morally judge situations became poor leading to a demise in his life and relationships. These cases have shown that damage to the frontal lobe changes how a person thinks and acts. We have seen that deficits in the frontal lobe are also commonly seen in people who are depressed, who experience chronic stress, in suicide victims, sociopaths and in incarcerated criminals. Since we can see that these brain changes affect personality and even life choices, it is not that far fetched to think that these same brain defects can lead to criminal behavior. For example, the prefrontal cortex is an area of the brain that acts to receive input from other areas of the brain and uses this information to make decisions. If this area is

The novel The Great Gatsby is a story that takes place in the 1920’s. The story

An Austrian physician by the name of Sigmund Freud, a well renowned psychologist, aside from his studies, was once rumored do have done enough cocaine to kill a baby horse. Other than his cocaine addiction he also developed the theory of Psychoanalysis, which in short means that he studied the longstanding difficulties in the ways that people think and feel about themselves, the world, and their relationships with others. Sigmund Freud’s ideals of psychoanalysis was translated to in a way where we are able to analyze media in all it’s shapes and forms. Psychoanalytic media analysis argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the characters within a movie, and the literary work is a manifestation of the Id, Super-Ego, and Ego. The text that I will analyze using the psychoanalytic media theory will be the film The Great Gatsby, originally a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I will be using Freud’s primary psychoanalytic theory of the ID, Ego, and Super-Ego to analyze the movie The Great Gatsby, and also analyze the potential cultural and societal impacts of an authors use of psychoanalytic theory.