Yeah, it's quite funny. We know they argued violently and that Gauguin was armed with a sword. We know that Gauguin rushed out of town that night leaving his sword behind. We know that the argument was directly in front of a brothel. We know that Vincent opened the door and handed the receptionist his ear in paper saying, "Hold this for me," then went home and fell asleep, and later refused to talk about the incident in any way.

From this we came up with: after an argument with Gauguin, he cut off his own ear and gave it to a prostitute he probably was in love with, which shows how crazy he was.

I mean, now we have the doctor's rendering and it's clearly a sword cut, but couldn't we have figured this out before? Really?