glove anesthesia
- noun
- /ɡlʌv ænəsˈθiːziə/
- Archaic
:
anestesia en guante
- The neurologist suspected glove anesthesia when her complaints of numbness did not match any known nerve distribution.
Examples
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Patients with conversion disorder may exhibit glove anesthesia during episodes of stress.
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The sudden onset of glove anesthesia was found to be related to psychological trauma.
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She was diagnosed with glove anesthesia after the accident.
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Doctors often see glove anesthesias in patients with anxiety.
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Patients with conversion disorder may exhibit glove anesthesia, a condition characterized by a loss of sensation in the hand.
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The neurologist suspected glove anesthesia because the patient's numbness pattern did not correlate with any physical nerve injuries.
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After the trauma, the sudden onset of glove anesthesia indicated that her symptoms were psychologically rather than physically induced.
How Numb
Surface Forms
Morphology
The combination 'glove' + 'anesthesia' directly suggests loss of sensation affecting the hand in a glove-like distribution, so a learner who knows both words would likely infer numbness of the hand/wrist. However, the clinical nuance that this pattern is typically psychogenic (rather than literal/surgical anesthesia) and the technical medical register are not predictable from the constituents, making the expression only partially transparent.
Etymology
Glove anesthesia comes from the picture of a hand that feels numb as if it were wearing a glove, and anesthesia means 'loss of feeling'. Because the numb area does not match any single nerve, doctors often see it as 'psychological' rather than physical, so the phrase now means numbness caused by the mind, not by nerve damage.