Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society » A Brief History of Phantom Limbs

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January 31st, 2007

A Brief History of Phantom Limbs

From “Not a Happy Fraction of a Man,” a Cabinet essay by Gaby Wood, author of Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life:

In the mid-sixteenth century, the great French surgeon Ambroise Paré discovered what he described as a “strange and grievous fact.” As surgeon to François I, Paré had accompanied the king on military campaigns of exceptional brutality. Thousands of French cavalrymen were killed and wounded by arquebuses, precursors of the musket that looked like small hand-held cannons and could blast even the most heavily armored bodies to pieces. Paré treated the wounds made by these weapons with turpentine and rose water, and he pioneered a safer method of amputation. But while creating his signature tourniquets, he found he could not tie up arteries without bruising nerves as well. The “strange and grievous fact” that arose as a consequence was that men who had lost their limbs felt the limbs to be still there. Not only did the patients imagine them, but they sometimes felt pain in these limbs, tried to walk on their non-existent legs, or reach for objects with a missing arm. Paré designed artificial body parts for his amputees, beautiful constructions to be made in metal by armorers, but he could do nothing for these strange configurations of the mind.

The essay is adapted from The Phantom Museum: Henry Wellcome’s Medical Mysteries.

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