Phantom experiences following amputation in childhood.

When a person has lost an arm or leg in an accident, or as the result of surgery, he typically continues to feel the lost extremity as if it were still present. On first awaking from the anaesthesia such a patient may not believe that the leg has actually been removed until he can convince himself by looking under the covers. Even once he knows beyond doubt that it is gone, the foot of the amputated leg may itch and, as he reaches down to scratch it, he reaches for an empty space. He may feel the bed sheets on the arm or leg, he may feel a mild, perhaps pleasant tingling, a phenomenon which Henderson and Smyth regard as basic (Henderson and Smyth, 1948), or, more rarely, he may have pain. He may feel that he can wiggle his fingers or toes, flex or extend the wrist or ankle, and that he can perform these movements more or less at will. Despite his knowledge of the amputation which has been performed the patient may 'forget' and reach out with his missing hand to grasp something, or to steady himself, or he may step on the phantom foot and fall. The earliest published account of phantom experiences following amputation is probably that of Ambroise Pare, the great French military surgeon of the sixteenth century (Keynes, 1952). A hundred years later Descartes, who evidently did not know Pare's treatise, described the sensations of a girl whose arm had been amputated at the elbow and complained about pain in the phantom fingers (Riese, 1958). Melville's scene between Captain Ahab and the ship's carpenter indicates that early in the nineteenth century, and probably long before that, there was a certain amount of popular knowledge concerning amputation phantoms (Melville, 1959). The carpenter, puzzled though he is by Captain Ahab's story, has heard 'that a dismasted man never entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it will be still pricking him at times'. The first systematic and fairly detailed description was given by Gueniot just a hundred years ago (Gueniot, 1861). Soon afterwards appeared Weir