d regains, the consciousness of the
presence of the lost parts, so that he will tell you, "Now I feel my
thumb, now I feel my little finger." I should also add that nearly every
person who has lost an arm above the elbow feels as though the lost
member were bent at the elbow, and at times is vividly impressed with
the notion that his fingers are strongly flexed.

Other persons present a peculiarity which I am at a loss to account for.
Where the leg, for instance, has been lost, they feel as if the foot
were present, but as though the leg were shortened. Thus, if the thigh
has been taken off, there seems to them to be a foot at the knee; if the
arm, a hand seems to be at the elbow, or attached to the stump itself.

Before leaving Nashville I had begun to suffer the most acute pain in
my left hand, especially the little finger; and so perfect was the idea
which was thus kept up of the real presence of these missing parts that
I found it hard at times to believe them absent. Often at night I would
try with one lost hand to grope for the other. As, however, I had no
pain in the right arm, the sense of the existence of that limb gradually
disappeared, as did that of my legs also.

Everything was done for my neuralgia which the doctors could think of;
and at length, at my suggestion, I was removed, as I have said, from
the Stump Hospital to the United States Army Hospital for Injuries
and Diseases of the Nervous System. It was a pleasant, suburban,
old-fashioned country-seat, its gardens surrounded by a circle of
wooden, one-story wards, shaded by fine trees. There were some three
hundred cases of epilepsy, paralysis, St. Vitus's dance, and wounds of
nerves. On one side of me lay a poor fellow, a Dane, who had the same
burning neuralgia with which I once suffered, and which I now learned
was only too common. This man had become hysterical from pain. He
carried a sponge in his pocket, and a bottle of water in one hand, with
which he constantly wetted the burning hand. Every sound increased his
torture, and he even poured water into his boots to keep himself from
feeling too sensibly the rough friction of his soles when walking. Like
him, I was greatly eased by having small doses of morphia injected under
the skin of my shoulder with a hollow needle fitted to a syringe.

As I improved under the morphia treatment, I began to be disturbed by
the horrible variety of suffering about me. One man walked sideways;
there was one who