Injuries of nerves and their consequences - Reflex Sympathetic ...

348 INJUKIES OF NERVES.
side. In anotlier instance of remarkable and constant
motions of an arm-stump, they ceased for some hours
after the patient had emerged unhurt from the wreck of
a railway accident.
—
Sensory hallucmations. Ko history of the physiology of
without some account of the
stumps would be complete
sensorial delusions to which persons are subject in connection
with their lost limbs. These hallucinations are
80 vivid, so strange, and so little dwelt upon by authors,
as to be well worthy of study, while some of them seem
to me especially valuable, owing to the light which
they cast upon the subject of the long-disputed muscular
sense.
Nearly every man who loses a limb carries about with
him a constant or inconstant phantom of the missing
member, a sensory ghost of that much of himself, and
sometimes a most inconvenient presence, faintly felt at
times, but ready to be called up to his perception by a
blow, a touch, or a change of wind.
Ambrose Pare* remarked upon the curious fact that
and in some of the
the absent limb is felt as if existing,
earlier treatises on amputation the same< symptom
is expressly
noticed.
Among ninety cases, including a great
variety of amputations, I have found but four cases — two
of an arm, the others of legs
— in which there never had
been delusion as to the presence of the absent member.
None of these cases were in any way singular
the state of the stump or other symptoms,
as to
but three of the
four were persons of inferior intellect, laborers by occupation.
In one of the arm cases, I carefully faradised the
brachial plexus without obtaining from the patient any
indication of subjective feelings referred to the lost parts.
Nor was he ever conscious, under any circumstances, of
* (Euvres Completes, edit. Malgaigne, t. ii. pp. 221 and 231, Paris.