It’s 50 years since the American neurologist Norman Geschwind published his hugely influential Disconnexion Syndromes in Animals and Man, in which he argued that many brain disorders and injuries could best be understood in terms of the damage incurred to the white-matter pathways connecting different areas of the brain.

To mark this anniversary, an international team of researchers has used modern brain imaging techniques to reveal, in an open-access article for Cerebral Cortex, the likely damage to brain connectivity suffered by three of psychology’s most famous cases: the 19th century rail worker Phineas Gage, who survived an iron rod passing through his brain; Louis Victor Leborgne, the 19th century aphasic patient studied by Paul Broca who played a key role in our understanding of language function in the brain; and the most studied amnesiac in history, Henry Molaison (known as H.M. in the literature), who died in 2008.

Michel Thiebaut de Schotten and his colleagues first obtained existing information about the brains of these three cases. For Gage they used a CT scan taken of his skull by researchers in 2004 and mapped the signs of injury onto a simulation of his brain. Leborgne’s brain is in preservation at the Dupuytren Museum in Paris and they used an MRI scan of it taken in 2007. For Molaison’s brain they used an MRI scan taken while he was still alive in 1993.

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