John Martyn Harlow

Who was John Martyn Harlow?

John Martyn Harlow was an American physician primarily remembered for his attendance on brain-injury survivor Phineas Gage, and for his published reports on Gage's accident and subsequent history.

Harlow was born in Whitehall, New York on November 25, 1819. He studied at Philadelphia School of Anatomy and graduated from Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia in 1844. His practice in Cavendish, Vermont, near which Gage's accident occurred in 1848, brought Gage under his care. In 1857 he left Cavendish due to poor health, and spent three years traveling and studying in Minnesota and Philadelphia before setting up a practice in Woburn, Massachusetts and joining the Massachusetts Medical Society on December 17, 1861. In 1866 he was still running a small practice in Woburn, and in his 1868 report on Gage he described himself as "from Woburn".

His first paper regarding Gage appeared in Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in late 1848; a short follow-up note appeared early the next year. Almost twenty years later, in 1868, he published a final paper recounting what he had been able to learn about the subsequent history of his patient, and presenting psychological changes in Gage which, presumably, were sequelae of the accident. In one of the most memorably strange examples ever of dogged long-term medical followup, Harlow, having "trac[ed Gage] in his wanderings over the greater part of this continent" had even obtained Gage's skull for use in preparing the paper.