Phineas Gage

Phineas Gage, Britannica

This article on Slate came up on one of my feeds again recently ... 

Back when I was a student runner for the ILL Department at an earlier rendition of Ebling Library  at UW-Madison, we'd often get requests for some of the early articles about Phineas Gage from the 1800s, He was a railway worker who had an iron spike accidentally blasted through his head, and survived!  These articles were in the closed stacks in Micaela's historical journals section and fragile.  The articles were requested so often, that we kept copies in the ILL Department so we would not have to disturb the originals in the history section and risk further degradation.

It was a fascinating case study.  I remember the article saying that when he was recovering from the accident, mushrooms started to grow out of his wound.  His physician removed the mushrooms, and cleaned the wound with alcohol, and they didn't grow back ...  Phineas made a complete recovery -- well, as complete as was possible.  People love to talk about his personality change after the accident, but there's some debate about that ...

There are multiple documentaries and articles about this famous patient, if you'd like to learn more.  Here are a few:

What if Part of your Brain was Missing. NOVA.   

How Phineas Gage's Freak Accident Changed Brain Science.  To the Best of Our Knowledge.  

Schleim S. Neuroscience Education Begins With Good Science: Communication About Phineas Gage (1823-1860), One of Neurology's Most-Famous Patients, in Scientific Articles. Front Hum Neurosci. 2022 Apr 28;16:734174. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2022.734174. PMID: 35572004; PMCID: PMC9096075. Link to article.

Why Brain Scientists Are Still Obsessed With The Curious Case Of Phineas Gage - NPR (2017)

Post by 2025 WHSLA Professional Development Grant Winner, Eileen Severson!

Guest post by WHSLA member, Eileen Severson

First, thank you for the boost of cash to attend MLA!  Here’s a bit about what I learned, and thought might be important for you all to know.

I took the CE entitled “Hospital Librarianship: Keeping Traditions and Bridging to Innovations: (Re)Vitalizing your Career and Your Library.”  The title of this course attracted me because there are times lately I’ve needed a bit of re-vitalizing around my career and library.  What I came away with the most was that I wasn’t alone.  I sat in a room of both exhausted but enthusiastic hospital librarians who shared their frustrations and problems as well as their successes.  We discussed creating a mission, vision and strategic plan for your library, and making sure they connected with the organization’s mission, vision, and strategic plan.   We brainstormed services and ways we could “get out of the library” and make our value known.  Some ideas were being on committees like continuing education, research, patient education, IRB, GME and grants.  Other ideas included attending grand rounds, morbidity and mortality conferences, and department meetings.  One of the librarians shared her email tag line that we all thought was spot on: “We use our expertise so you can focus on using yours”.  Through this course I met some creative and kind librarians with lots of ideas and feel more energized to try new things in my library.

I attended a variety of symposiums and poster presentations.  Some takeaways from these presentations:

• Take time to reflect on how you are hiring—is it inclusive? Where can you offer flexibility in the position description and job ad?  Do years of experience need to be in a library—what other experience does the candidate have?  Be more flexible in the interview—for example, give the candidate the questions before the interview, turn off the camera to give candidate time to think before answering a question.  Allow notes—this isn’t a test! 

•  Succession planning! This presentation hit home for me.  Basically, if you have someone retiring or moving to a different position—make sure to document, document, document all that they do.  The presenters suggested that the documents don’t have to be prescriptive but should describe the thought process when performing tasks.  They created flow-charts showing the thought process of several responsibilities of one of their retiring staff. 

•   How to highlight your library as a value driven partner: 
• Use data that means something to your leaders; align your data with organizational goals.   
• How much money does the library save?  How do we help meet strategic objectives of the organization?  What is the ROI of the library?
• Don’t just share the data, include narrative, stories.  Make sure to eliminate library jargon. 
• How do we provide a community benefit?
• Talk to people, attend events
• Connect work with incentives/reimbursement 

• AI is the new hottest topic—it was everywhere at MLA.  I have determined I need to learn more about it and our library needs to be a resource for understanding and teaching others about AI. 

I also networked with my fellow WHSLA Professional Development winner, Kathy Koch!!!

Before (left) and after (right) photos below:

 

The Nightmare of Plain Text Citations (and some potential workarounds!)

Picture this: A researcher contacts you. They're wanting to insert citations into a Word document, but the in-text citations and bibliography don't seem to be updating in the document when they insert citations using EndNote. They send the document to you, and you discover all the citations in the document are plain text citations. You follow up with the researcher, and receive the response you most dread: their colleagues added citations manually, without a citation manager.

As librarians, this scenario might seem all too familiar. While I don't have a quick solution for fixing the issue, I do have some workarounds I've employed to help streamline the process of replacing in-text citations with EndNote citations. These workarounds include generating PubMed DOI searches from a plain text reference list using Excel, automatically highlighting plain text superscripts in a Word document, and using the aforementioned Excel sheet as a "cheat sheet" for inserting citations into your document.

Just in case someone else might these workarounds helpful, I included these in the video below. The Excel codes I used for this video are included at the bottom of this post, along with a few notes for each of the codes.

As a note, if you're only interested in converting a plain text bibliography into an RIS, Citation Finder is another great option! If you do use this, however, I recommend using the "Find Reference Updates" option in EndNote, as this will help ensure your citations have more detailed and accurate metadata. 

 

Excel code for extracting DOIs:

=RIGHT(B1:B62,LEN(B1:B62)-SEARCH("doi:", B1:B62)-3)

*Make sure the highlighted ranges include the column that has your citation information. For example, if your citation information was in Column A, you will need to replace all instances of B with A in that Excel code. The "62" refers the last cell in the column that has information in it. You can adjust this number as needed (but be sure to do so for each instance of 62 in the code!). 

 

Excel code for creating PubMed search

=CHAR(34)&C1:C62&CHAR(34)&"[doi] OR “

*Make sure the highlighted range includes the Column that has your extracted DOI’s. The "62" refers to the last cell in the column that has information in it. You can adjust this number as needed (but be sure to do so for each instance of 62 in the code!). 

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!