Phantom Pains and Prosthetic Narratives

Phantom Pains and Prosthetic Narratives PDF

Author: Alastair Minnis

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-02-18

Total Pages: 131

ISBN-13: 1108996205

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'Phantom limb pain' designates the sensations which seem to emanate from limbs that in reality are missing. The phrase was coined by the American Civil War surgeon, Weir Mitchell, in reference to his fictional amputee, George Dedlow. Contemporary neuroscience holds that the brain encloses a schema which covers the whole body, and asserts its unity even if certain parts are missing. Reading backwards from Dedlow's sufferings, Alastair Minnis traces the medieval precedents and parallels, focusing on Augustine and Dante, who subscribed to the notion of a 'body in the soul'. Dante's souls in purgatory self-prosthesize with aerial phantoms as they long for the full embodiment which only the resurrection can bring. Is a complete body necessary for personhood? And how can the gamut of human feelings be run if parts or the entirety of one's body does not exist? Combining medieval studies and contemporary neuroscience, this absorbing study explores the fascinating and surprising history of phantom pain.

Phantom Pain

Phantom Pain PDF

Author: Richard A. Sherman

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2013-03-14

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1475761694

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Phantom pain is an intriguing mystery that has captured the imagination of health care providers and the public alike. How is it possible to feel pain in a limb or some other body part that has been surgically removed? Phantom pain develops among people who have lost a limb or a breast or have had internal organs removed. It also occurs in people with totally transected spinal cords. Unfortunately, phantom pain is a medical night mare. Many of the people reporting phantom pain make dispropor tionately heavy use of the medical system because their severe pains are usually not treated successfully. The effect on quality of life can be devas tating. Phantom pain has been reported at least since 1545 (Weir Mitchell as related by Nathanson, 1988) and/ or experienced by such diverse people as Admiral Lord Nelson and Ambroise Pare (Melzack & Wall, 1982; Davis, 1993). The folklore surrounding phantom pain is fascinating and mirrors the concepts about how our bodies work that are in vogue at any particu lar time. Most of the stories relate to phantom limbs and date from the mid-1800s. The typical story goes like this: A man who had his leg ampu tated complained about terrible crawling, twitching feelings in his leg. His friends found out where the leg was buried, dug it up, and found maggots eating it. They burned it, and the pain stopped. Another man complained of a swollen feeling with frequent stinging or biting pains.

Phantom Limb

Phantom Limb PDF

Author: Cassandra Crawford

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2014-01-20

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0814760120

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Phantom limb pain is one of the most intractable and merciless pains ever known—a pain that haunts appendages that do not physically exist, often persisting with uncanny realness long after fleshy limbs have been traumatically, surgically, or congenitally lost. The very existence and “naturalness” of this pain has been instrumental in modern science’s ability to create prosthetic technologies that many feel have transformative, self-actualizing, and even transcendent power. In Phantom Limb, Cassandra S. Crawford critically examines phantom limb pain and its relationship to prosthetic innovation, tracing the major shifts in knowledge of the causes and characteristics of the phenomenon. Crawford exposes how the meanings of phantom limb pain have been influenced by developments in prosthetic science and ideas about the extraordinary power of these technologies to liberate and fundamentally alter the human body, mind, and spirit. Through intensive observation at a prosthetic clinic, interviews with key researchers and clinicians, and an analysis of historical and contemporary psychological and medical literature, she examines the modernization of amputation and exposes how medical understanding about phantom limbs has changed from the late-19th to the early-21st century. Crawford interrogates the impact of advances in technology, medicine, psychology and neuroscience, as well as changes in the meaning of limb loss, popular representations of amputees, and corporeal ideology. Phantom Limb questions our most deeply held ideas of what is normal, natural, and even moral about the physical human body.

Phantom and Stump Pain

Phantom and Stump Pain PDF

Author: J. Siegfried

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 3642682642

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The phenomenon of phantom limb was described in medical literature at least as early as 1545 by Ambroise Pare, according to the notes in the translation of Lemos' dissertation, "On the Continuing Pain of an Amputated Limb", by Price and Twombly [9]. This strange experience was brought to public attention by a popular essay anonymously published 1866 by Mitchell concerning the story of George Dedlow, a quadriamputee who described his invisible limbs [7]. In 1871 Mitchell wrote under his own name, and was the. first to use the term "phantom limb" [8]. In this work, he also corrected some erroneous beliefs that had arisen from his 1866 essay [13]. Most amputees report feeling a phantom limb almost immediately after amputation of an arm or a leg [11]. It is a positive sensation, usually described as tingling or numbness, which is not painful. The most distal parts of the limb, particulary the digits, thumb, and index, are the strongest and most persisting phantom sites, and may be the only parts to appear even after removal of a whole limb. The elbow or knee is sometimes involved, the forearm or lower leg rarely, and the upper arm and thigh almost never [5]. The phantom thus appears to consist predominantly of those parts which have the most extensive representa tion in the thalamus and in the cerebral cortex.

Amputation, Prosthesis Use, and Phantom Limb Pain

Amputation, Prosthesis Use, and Phantom Limb Pain PDF

Author: Craig Murray

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-03-14

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 9780387874630

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The main objective in the rehabilitation of people following amputation is to restore or improve their functioning, which includes their return to work. Full-time employment leads to beneficial health effects and being healthy leads to increased chances of full-time employment (Ross and Mirowskay 1995). Employment of disabled people enhances their self-esteem and reduces social isolation (Dougherty 1999). The importance of returning to work for people following amputation the- fore has to be considered. Perhaps the first article about reemployment and problems people may have at work after amputation was published in 1955 (Boynton 1955). In later years, there have been sporadic studies on this topic. Greater interest and more studies about returning to work and problems people have at work following amputation arose in the 1990s and has continued in recent years (Burger and Marinc ?ek 2007). These studies were conducted in different countries on all the five continents, the greatest number being carried out in Europe, mainly in the Netherlands and the UK (Burger and Marinc ?ek 2007). Owing to the different functions of our lower and upper limbs, people with lower limb amputations have different activity limitations and participation restrictions compared to people with upper limb amputations. Both have problems with driving and carrying objects. People with lower limb amputations also have problems standing, walking, running, kicking, turning and stamping, whereas people with upper limb amputations have problems grasping, lifting, pushing, pulling, writing, typing, and pounding (Giridhar et al. 2001).

Targeted Muscle Reinnervation

Targeted Muscle Reinnervation PDF

Author: Todd A. Kuiken

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2013-07-23

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1439860815

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Implement TMR with Your Patients and Improve Their Quality of LifeDeveloped by Dr. Todd A. Kuiken and Dr. Gregory A. Dumanian, targeted muscle reinnervation (TMR) is a new approach to accessing motor control signals from peripheral nerves after amputation and providing sensory feedback to prosthesis users. This practical approach has many advantage

The Prosthetic Imagination

The Prosthetic Imagination PDF

Author: Peter Boxall

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-09-03

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 1108872646

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In The Prosthetic Imagination, leading critic Peter Boxall argues that we are now entering an artificial age, in which our given bodies enter into new conjunctions with our prosthetic extensions. This new age requires us to reimagine our relation to our bodies, and to our environments, and Boxall suggests that the novel as a form can guide us in this imaginative task. Across a dazzling range of prose fictions, from Thomas More's Utopia to Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Boxall shows how the novel has played a central role in forging the bodies in which we extend ourselves into the world. But if the novel has helped to give our world a human shape, it also contains forms of life that elude our existing human architectures: new amalgams of the living and the non-living that are the hidden province of the novel imagination. These latent conjunctions, Boxall argues, are preserved in the novel form, and offer us images of embodied being that can help us orient ourselves to our new prosthetic condition.

Knowing Pain

Knowing Pain PDF

Author: Rob Boddice

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2023-05-09

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1509550550

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Pain, while known to almost everyone, is not universal. The evidence of our own pain, and our own experience, does not provide us with automatic insight into the pains of others, past or present. No matter how self-evident and ubiquitous the sting of a paper cut or the desolation of heartbreak might seem, pain is situated and historically specific. In a work that is sometimes personal, always political, Rob Boddice reveals a history of pain that juggles many disciplinary approaches and disparate languages to tackle the thorniest challenges in pain research. He explores the shifting meaning-making processes that produce painful experiences, expanding the world of pain to take seriously the relationship between pain’s physicality and social and emotional suffering. Ranging from antiquity to the present and taking in pain knowledge and pain experiences from around the world, his tale encompasses not only injury, but also grief, exclusion, chronic pain, and trauma, and reveals how knowledge claims about pain occupy what pain is like. Innovative and compassionate in equal measure, Knowing Pain puts forward an original pain agenda that is essential reading for those interested in the history of emotions, senses, and experience, for medical researchers and practitioners, and for anyone who has known pain.

Amputation in Literature and Film

Amputation in Literature and Film PDF

Author: Erik Grayson

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-08-10

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 3030743772

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Amputation in Literature and Film: Artificial Limbs, Prosthetic Relations, and the Semiotics of “Loss” explores the many ways in which literature and film have engaged with the subject of amputation. The scholars featured in this volume draw upon a wide variety of texts, both lesser-known and canonical, across historical periods and language traditions to interrogate the intersections of disability studies with social, political, cultural, and philosophical concerns. Whether focusing on ancient texts by Zhuangzi or Ovid, renaissance drama, folktales collected by the Brothers Grimm, novels or silent film, the chapters in this volume highlight the dialectics of “loss” and “gain” in narratives of amputation to encourage critical dialogue and forge an integrated, embodied understanding of experiences of impairment in which mind and body, metaphor and materiality, theory and politics are considered as interrelated and interacting aspects of disability and ability.

You're Not Alone

You're Not Alone PDF

Author: John Sabolich

Publisher:

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13:

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Thirty-eight amputees share their feelings about the physical and emotional pain, as well as the courage it takes to put pity aside and go on with life.