From Jaques de Boys
Helen Thomson writes that all documented pain synaesthetes suffered traumatic pain before developing the condition: “Many are amputees, and their phantom limb is the site of the pain they feel when faced with another’s distress” (13 March, p 42).
All my life – I am now 64 – whenever I heard about someone being sliced by a sharp object I felt a sharp pain in my circumcision scar. Now I know why. My case may expand the understanding of this phenomenon: unlike most amputees, I was only a week old when I was circumcised and have no conscious memory of it.
It was a routine circumcision performed by a competent doctor, but in late 1945 newborns being circumcised in the UK probably did not receive any anaesthetic.
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