The Frontal Cortex

Phantom limbs are one of the strangest phenomenon you'll ever hear about. As far as I can tell, phantom limbs were first described by Herman Melville, who gave Ahab, the gnarly sea captain of Moby Dick, a "sensory ghost". Ahab is missing a leg (Moby Dick ate it), and in Chapter 108, he summons a carpenter to fashion him a new ivory peg-leg. Ahab tells the carpenter that he still feels his amputated leg "invisibly and uninterpenetratingly." His phantom limb is like a "poser". "Look," Ahab says, "put thy live leg here in the place where mine was; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the soul. Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, there to a hair, do I. Is't a riddle?"

Twelve years later, Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, a "doctor of nerves" at Turner's Lane hospital in Pennsylvania, noticed that many of his soliders injured during the Battle of Gettysburg displayed a strange set of symptoms: After their limbs were amputated, it was not uncommon for a soldier to continue to "feel" their missing arms and legs. The patients said it was like living with a ghost. Their own flesh had returned to haunt them.

Weir Mitchell went on to write several medical reports about the "sensory ghost" phenomenon. He even wrote a short story about it, entitled "The Case of George Dedlow," which was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1866. (Readers thought George Dedlow was a real person, and started a collection for him.) Even William James got in on the action, and wrote an 1887 article on "The Consciousness of Lost Limbs." (James loved this sort of "psychical" stuff.)

But most scientists and doctors didn't know what to do with this phenomenon. It was just too strange, too immaterial. After Weir Mitchell became a full time novelist, sensory ghosts lapsed into obscurity. Sadly, it would take another 30 years - and another brutal war - before sensory ghosts were re-discovered. In 1917, confronted by the maimed soldiers of WWI, the neurologist J. Babinski described his own version of sensory ghosts. He makes no mention of Herman Melville, William James or Weir Mitchell.

Now we are fighting another war, and, as always, many soldiers return home missing a limb. A significant percentage of these soldiers will develop "phantom limbs". But now, almost 150 years after the Battle of Gettysburg, we finally have a way to treat these "ghosts":

Scientists have developed a computer system which allows amputees to see and move a 3D "phantom limb" in place of their lost one, it was revealed yesterday.

In a small study, the system, created by scientists at the University of Manchester, has helped some patients suffering from a condition known as phantom limb pain - discomfort felt by a person in a limb that is missing due to amputation.

Project leader Craig Murray, of the university's school of psychological sciences, said: "One patient felt that the fingers of her amputated hand were continually clenched into her palm, which was very painful for her.

"However, after just one session using the virtual system she began to feel movement in her fingers and the pain began to ease."