Originally published here: aeon.co/essays/gener...

Thank you, it's a terrific image (I am the writer)! I really liked how you based it on the actual view from Montenvers. I initially thought it was a frontispiece-style image from the 1800s - timeless!

that's me in the picture, enjoying my mid-40s

The next day, Phil returns to ask for a copy of the photo. He knocks at the door... "Sally? Who is Sally?" the man asks.

Anyway I'd really recommend spending a bit of time with Ben's essay, which explores the legacies and contradictions of these two men. He spent months working on it, and it's written with compassion, rigour and insight.

...whereas Eadweard Muybridge - another brain injury survivor who was a contemporary of Gage's, but a different class - has been lauded. I had seen Muybridge's photography (it's displayed in my local cinema in Kingston where he was born, for instance). What I never realised: he murdered a guy.

Gage is commonly described as a case study for "disinhibition", a behaviour change prompted by brain injury. But as Ben explores in the essay, the evidence for that is rather thin...