“The Conviction of its Existence”: Silas Weir Mitchell, Phantom Limbs and Phantom Bodies in Neurology and Spiritualism

Abstract

In 1866, the American neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell anonymously (and, in his account, unwittingly) published a fictional account entitled ‘The Case of George Dedlow’ in the Atlantic Monthly.1 Dedlow, the narrator of the story, describes, in the first person, how during the Civil War he is gradually reduced to a “useless torso, more like some strange larval creature than anything of human shape” (129), having had both his arms and legs amputated. Increasingly throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, amputees became a highly visible part of the population, due to both the accidents of the industrialization of modernity and, in America, the devastating effects of the Civil War of 1861–5. This visibly dismembered citizen corresponded also to a new understanding of the body in neurological terms, as a series of imperceptible symptoms began to haunt their bodies, demanding to be taken seriously as medical occurrences invisible to the human eye. In the story, George Dedlow, himself a doctor (clearly ghost-writing Mitchell’s medical experiences as a physician on the battlefield), objectively describes phantom limb phenomena of his own body and of other fellow amputees. In 1871, five years after ‘The Case of George Dedlow’, Mitchell published a neurological account in an article entitled ‘Phantom limbs’, which appeared in Lippincott’s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, thus saving the phenomena from centuries of medical eclipse.