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From the Archives
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Phantom limbs and body shape (Being the Presidential Address, Neurological Section, Royal Society of Medicine, 1941). By George Riddoch. Brain 1941; 64: 197–222.
‘Knowledge of the persistence, as a phantom, of a limb which has been removed ... must have been mysterious to our forefathers, whose physiological and psychological advantages were less than our own ... it would not be surprising if the unfortunate patient was regarded as an obstinate, lying fellow or possessed of the devil ... it was a matter that was best left alone’. Dr Riddoch goes on to present a sympathetic analysis of the reticence that the modern patient still displays in confronting something so strange: ‘dread of the unusual, of disbelief, or even the accusation of insanity’. In contrast to the phantom-illusion disorders of body image that accompany insanity and hysteria—in that context, the outcome of gross mental disturbance—those that follow a lesion of the
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