Brian Dillon writes:

Much of the most fascinating historical material in The Inner Touch – as distinct from Heller-Roazen’s careful yet audacious reading of literary and philosophical works – has to do with such disorders of the common sense. In July 1866, for example, in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, one George Dedlow told how he had lost all his limbs in the Civil War and been consigned to Stump Hospital, Philadelphia. He was in consequence ‘not a happy fraction of a man’: reduced, he said, to a sort of larval state, but tormented by phantom pains at all four former extremities. Worse, in a way, was the less localised sensation of no longer being all there. Dedlow was ‘haunted and perplexed’ by this ‘strange want’: by the partial loss, precisely, of his common or master sense. That the unhappy ‘George Dedlow’ was in fact the pseudonymous invention of the neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell does not detract from the central insight of the essay: the nervous system could conjure out of nothing not only exquisite pain, but monstrous delusions regarding the existence, or non-existence, of the self.

(LRB 5 June 2008)

Zone | hardback 386 pp. |ISBN: 9781890951764