The Most Disturbing Medical Injuries in History

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]The most disturbing medical injuries in history.

[00:00:05]Phineas Gage, the man who lost his brain and kept his life.

[00:00:11]Phineas Gage stands over a drilled hole in solid rock, tamping iron gripped loose in his hand like it's part of him.

[00:00:18]He's laughing mid-sentence, chatting easily with his crew. He thrust the heavy rod down hard without looking, straight into the hole. Sharp metallic scrape against stone.

[00:00:30]A sudden hiss.

[00:00:32]His eyes snap wide in an instant realization.

[00:00:36]Black powder flashes, a deafening boom.

[00:00:40]What just happened?

[00:00:42]Born in July 1823 in Lebanon, New Hampshire, Gage was a railroad foreman for the Rutland and Burlington Railroad.

[00:00:49]His bosses praised him. His crew trusted him. Everyone agreed, Phineas Gage was the most reliable man on any crew he touched. He was so good at his job that he had a custom tool made just for him, a tamping iron.

[00:01:04]43 inches long, 1 and 1/4 inches wide, 13 and 1/2 pounds, tapered to a sharp point at one end. He even had his name engraved on it and carried it everywhere. Foreshadowing?

[00:01:18]Obviously. On the morning of September 13, 1848, Gage was overseeing a blasting operation at a rail cut just south of Cavendish, Vermont. The job was simple.

[00:01:29]Drill a hole in the rock, pour in black powder, add a layer of sand, then use the tamping iron to pack it down before lighting the fuse. He's done this hundreds of times. He could do it with his eyes closed.

[00:01:44]But on this particular afternoon, Gage was feeling chatty.

[00:01:48]He drilled the hole and poured in the powder per usual. Then he continued to talk [ __ ] with his crew member when he thrusted his rod down without looking.

[00:01:57]But the sand had not been added yet.

[00:02:00]The rod scraped the rock wall of the drill hole.

[00:02:03]The powder ignited. And that's when Gage knew he had [ __ ] up.

[00:02:09]The tamping iron shot upward like a cannonball.

[00:02:12]It entered beneath his left cheekbone, punched behind his left eye, tore straight through the front of his brain, and blew clean out of the top of his skull.

[00:02:22]That special rod of his landed 80 ft away, covered in blood and brain matter.

[00:02:29]And Phineas Gage stood straight up.

[00:02:34]His crew carried him to an oxcart.

[00:02:36]He sat upright the entire mile-long ride into town.

[00:02:40]He arrived at the Cavendish Tavern, climbed the front steps by the grace of his will, and took a seat on the porch to wait for the doctor.

[00:02:49]When Dr. Edward Williams arrived an hour later, Gage was in the chair, alert, and in a talking mood.

[00:02:58]"Doctor," he said pleasantly, "here is business enough for you."

[00:03:04]Williams looked at the wound.

[00:03:06]He could see Gage's brain pulsing through the exit hole at the top of his skull with every heartbeat.

[00:03:12]Every 20 minutes or so, Gage vomited.

[00:03:15]Each time, a small amount of brain matter was expelled alongside it on the tavern floor.

[00:03:21]Gage picked up his sentence where he had left off each time.

[00:03:25]Dr. John Harlow arrived shortly after.

[00:03:28]He was 29 years old, 4 years out of Jefferson Medical College.

[00:03:33]He had, until this evening, mostly treated broken bones and farming accidents.

[00:03:38]Translation: He had no idea what the [ __ ] he was going to do.

[00:03:43]He assessed the situation.

[00:03:45]He had no anesthesia, no antibiotics, no surgical tools designed for brain injuries.

[00:03:52]These people didn't even know about germs.

[00:03:55]That theory would not be proposed for another 9 years.

[00:03:58]Dr. Harlow applied his treatment. Keep both wounds open for drainage, apply wet compresses, and elevate the head.

[00:04:06]Then, wait.

[00:04:08]It was 1848. That was medicine.

[00:04:12]For 11 days, it appeared to be working.

[00:04:15]Then, the infection arrived.

[00:04:17]Fungal tissue began pushing out through the skull wound and from behind Gage's left eye simultaneously.

[00:04:23]The smell in the room became unbearable.

[00:04:26]A local cabinetmaker arrived and, with appropriate tact, measured Gage for a coffin.

[00:04:32]Harlow's own attending assistant pulled him aside and told him to stop.

[00:04:37]Let the man go peacefully.

[00:04:39]Harlow said no.

[00:04:41]He excised the fungal tissue himself.

[00:04:45]He applied silver nitrate directly to the exposed surface of the brain.

[00:04:49]He made a long incision from the crown of the skull down to the bridge of the nose and drained 8 oz of foul-smelling pus from the cavity beneath. Then, he repacked the wound and sat back down to wait. By the grace of God and all that is holy, it worked.

[00:05:05]2 weeks later, Gage was sitting upright.

[00:05:08]By mid-October, he was walking.

[00:05:11]By late November, Harlow was physically blocking the door to stop him from going back to the work site.

[00:05:17]The physical recovery was, by any measure, remarkable.

[00:05:22]But, everything else was not.

[00:05:25]The railroad refused to take him back.

[00:05:27]The man they had called their most capable foreman had changed in ways that were hard to describe and impossible to miss.

[00:05:34]Harlow's notes documented him as fitful, irreverent, and incapable of following through on any plan he made.

[00:05:41]He cursed at strangers.

[00:05:44]He was rude to people he had previously respected.

[00:05:48]He made decisions and reversed them within the hour.

[00:05:52]His friends and former crew, when asked, said the same thing in different words.

[00:05:57]He was no longer Phineas Gage.

[00:05:59]Gage spent the following 12 years in a slow drift. He worked at a stable in New Hampshire. He joined Barnum's American Museum in New York as a living exhibit, tamping iron in hand, and charged admission.

[00:06:12]He drove a stagecoach in Valparaiso, Chile, for a stretch of years.

[00:06:17]He came back to the United States in 1859, his health collapsing, and moved in with his mother in San Francisco.

[00:06:24]He died on May 21, 1860, from a series of epileptic seizures that his physicians attributed to the old brain injury. He was 36 years old. However, Harlow never let the case go.

[00:06:37]In 1866, he located Gage's grave in San Francisco and convinced the family to exhume the body.

[00:06:44]He recovered the skull and the tamping iron and brought both back east.

[00:06:49]In 1868, he published a full case in the publications of the Massachusetts Medical Society.

[00:06:55]It became one of the most cited papers in the history of neuroscience.

[00:06:59]It was the first documented evidence that personality, judgment, and social behavior are physical functions of a specific part of the brain.

[00:07:07]The skull and the tamping iron are on permanent display at Harvard's Warren Anatomical Museum.

[00:07:13]The engraving of the name is still legible. Phineas P. Gage.

[00:07:17]The rod outlasted the man by over 160 years. I don't know any rods that can last that long without a pill.

[00:07:27]Now, hit me with a comment and make it a good one. The top liked comment goes on our channel banner and gets a shout-out in the next video. Let's build the best community in YouTube. Don't make me read something boring. My brain's already been through enough. Shannon Malloy, the woman who lost her head.

[00:07:47]There is a medical term for what happened to Shannon Malloy on January 25, 2007.

[00:07:53]It's called internal decapitation.

[00:07:56]She was alive when it happened and she's still alive now.

[00:08:01]Malloy was 30 years old living in Nebraska, a passenger in a car on an otherwise unremarkable wintery evening.

[00:08:08]The crash happened fast. She hit the dashboard hard and in that single instant of impact, her skull separated from the top of her spine.

[00:08:18]"I remember the impact," she said. "And then, I had no control over my head.

[00:08:24]I wasn't focused so much on the pain. I just kept thinking, I have to stay alive."

[00:08:31]She was taken to a hospital in Nebraska.

[00:08:34]The doctors assessed her injury.

[00:08:36]Then they pulled her family aside.

[00:08:39]"We've never ever seen this injury in a person that's alive," her mother Robin was told.

[00:08:45]"You need to say your goodbyes now."

[00:08:48]Shannon Malloy did not say goodbye.

[00:08:50]She was transferred to the Denver Spine Center in Colorado, where Dr. Gary Ghiselli, an orthopedic spine surgeon, took her case.

[00:08:59]Ghiselli had seen this injury exactly once before in his career.

[00:09:03]That patient had not made it.

[00:09:05]He had also never seen it in someone still living.

[00:09:09]He operated anyway.

[00:09:11]The procedure, as he designed it, worked like this.

[00:09:15]Five screws were drilled into her neck bones to anchor the base.

[00:09:19]Four more screws were drilled into her skull to anchor the top. A steel halo, a circular metal bar attached to rods bolted to her shoulders, locked around the outside of her head to hold everything motionless while the bones attempted to reconnect.

[00:09:34]It was not a comfortable procedure.

[00:09:37]It was also not a smooth one.

[00:09:39]"My skull slipped off my neck about five times." Molloy said.

[00:09:44]"Every time they tried to screw this to my head, I would slip."

[00:09:48]She was conscious for parts of this.

[00:09:51]She reported the sensation of her skull sliding off during the procedure.

[00:09:55]Five times.

[00:09:57]Giselle kept going.

[00:09:59]By the time the halo was fully secured, Molloy had a fractured skull, a swollen brain stem, bleeding in the brain, a feeding tube in her stomach because she could not swallow, and nerve damage causing both eyes to cross.

[00:10:14]She could speak only in short bursts between gasps for breath.

[00:10:18]"Oh my god, it's a miracle."

[00:10:21]She said from the hospital bed, pausing for air between each word.

[00:10:26]She was in intensive care for 3 weeks.

[00:10:29]Two more weeks of rehabilitation followed.

[00:10:32]Then she walked out.

[00:10:34]Not wheeled.

[00:10:35]Not assisted by a frame. She walked out.

[00:10:40]The limitations she left with were significant.

[00:10:43]She could turn her head approximately 1 in in either direction.

[00:10:47]She could not swallow water.

[00:10:49]"My esophagus muscle is so tight that even water won't pass through." She said.

[00:10:55]"I can't even swallow my own spit."

[00:10:58]Her eyes remained crossed. The nerve damage controlling them had not resolved.

[00:11:03]A subsequent surgery temporarily corrected the vision.

[00:11:07]Three days later, both eyes turned completely outward. She went back on the surgical list.

[00:11:13]Four months after the crash, the halo was removed.

[00:11:16]Giselle stood outside his own clinical vocabulary when describing it.

[00:11:21]"It's a miracle that she survived the accident." He said. "It's a miracle that she's made the progress that she's made."

[00:11:29]He had said the same thing twice. He meant it both times. When asked about the prospect of a full recovery, she was measured about it. "I know that's not going to be a great possibility," she said. "I could come real close, though."

[00:11:44]Her family, for their part, had a theory about her relentless positivity throughout the whole ordeal.

[00:11:50]"My family keeps joking that I must be brain damaged because I'm so positive," she said.

[00:11:56]Giselle said it was her will to survive that had kept her alive long enough for the surgery to even be attempted.

[00:12:03]The Nebraska doctors had already written her off. She had not written herself off. That, in the end, is the thing that separates this story from the ones that end differently. Her skull is, as of the last reported account, still attached.

[00:12:19]She would like to keep it that way.