Many persons feel the lost limb as existing the moment they awaken from the merciful stupor of the ether given to destroy the torments of the knife; others come slowly to this consciousness in days or weeks, and when the wound has healed; but, as a rule, the more sound and serviceable the stump, especially if an artificial limb be worn, the more likely is the man to feel faintly the presence of the shorn member. Sometimes a blow on the stump will reawaken such consciousness, or, as happened in one case, a reamputation higher up the limb will summon it anew into seeming existence.

In many, the limb may be recalled to the man by irritating the nerves in its stump. Every doctor knows that when any part of a nerve is excited by the excited by a pinch, a tap or by electricity – which is an altogether harmless means – the pain, if it be a nerve of feeling, is felt as if it were really caused in the part to which the nerve finally passes.

[...]

On one occasion the shoulder was thus electrized three inches above the point where the arm had been cut off. For two years the man had ceased to be conscious of the limb. As the current passed, although ignorant of its possible effects, he started up, crying aloud, ‘Oh, the hand, the hand!’ and trying to seize it with the living grasp of the sound fingers. No resurrection of the dead, no answer of a summoned spirit, could have been more startling. As the current was broken the lost part faded again, only to be recalled by the same means.