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

354 INJURIES OF NERVES.
ally some difSculty in determining whether or not it
swings with the motions of the body in walking. In only
one case did it
appear to be bent at the knee.
In fourteen arm amputations at divers points, the arm
seemed in two to hang at the side, and in seven to be
bent, the hand lying in air a little way from the left breast
or straight in front, and the hallucination as to position
being insisted on even by those who declared themselves
unconscious of the limb's continuity. The remaining
five
felt the hand to be in the air, somewhere in front of the
chest, but had no consciousness of flexion at the elbow.
The posture of the lost
hand ma}'' best be described by
simply quoting a few of the descriptions given me by
patients. In many it seems to be at rest, extended, the
fingers in a like posture; and these cases have usually, or
seem to themselves to have, the best power of voluntary
movements. Others carry with them a hand in a state of
more or less violent flexion, and possess but slight control
over it. Another class has the hand constantly in
some painful position which it
occupied before the operation,
so that the last real sensation is so stamped upon the
sensorium as to forbid its erasure by any future impression.
We have realized here, in regard to common sensation,
the fable which describes the retina as retaining after
death the last picture which fell upon its living concavity.
These cases sufler horribly both from volitional efibrts
and from such faradisation of the nerves as causes subjective
motor sensations.
Mr. T. lost his arm five inches below the elbow at the
age of six years, eighteen years ago. The arm appears to
lie out from the side, the wVist flexed, the fingers seraiflexed;
every voluntary efiJbrt causes intense pain in the
stump the hand seems to be at the elbow.
;
J. H., aged forty-two, lost his right arm four inches
above the elbow, twenty- four years ago.
He feels the