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Drawing together essays written by scholars from Great Britain and the United States, this book provides an important contribution to the emerging field of disability history. It explores the development of modern transatlantic prosthetic industries in nineteenth and twentieth centuries and reveals how the co-alignment of medicine, industrial capitalism, and social norms shaped diverse lived experiences of prosthetic technologies and in turn, disability identities. Through case studies that focus on hearing aids, artificial tympanums, amplified telephones, artificial limbs, wigs and dentures, this book provides a new account of the historic relationship between prostheses, disability and industry. Essays draw on neglected source material, including patent records, trade literature and artefacts, to uncover the historic processes of commodification surrounding different prostheses and the involvement of neglected companies, philanthropists, medical practitioners, veterans, businessmen, wives, mothers and others in these processes. Its culturally informed commodification approach means that this book will be relevant to scholars interested in cultural, literary, social, political, medical, economic and commercial history.
This book is a critical examination of the relationships between war, medicine, and the pressures of modernization in the waning stages of the German Empire. Through her examination of wartime medical and scientific innovations, government and military archives, museum and health exhibitions, philanthropic works, consumer culture and popular media, historian Heather Perry reveals how the pressures of modern industrial warfare did more than simply transform medical care for injured soldiers—they fundamentally re-shaped how Germans perceived the disabled body. As the Empire faced an ever more desperate labour shortage, military and government leaders increasingly turned to medical authorities for assistance in the re-organization of German society for total war. Thus, more than a simple history of military medicine or veteran care, Recycling the Disabled tells the story of the medicalization of modern warfare in Imperial Germany and the lasting consequences of this shift in German society.
158 7 SEPARATING THE SURGIC AL AND COMMERCIAL: SPACE, PROSTHETICS AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR Julie Anderson On 24 February 1920, King George V and Queen Mary attended the British Industrial Fair at Crystal Palace in London. From contemporaneous newspaper reports, it is clear that the king in particular was interested in the artificial limbs on display. The royal couple and other attendees marvelled at the demonstration by a one-armed man who manipulated a 14-pound sledgehammer and took a cigarette from a packet, lit it with a match and, as it was reported
2 RE-ARMING THE DISABLED: WWI AND THE REVOLUTION IN ARTIFICIAL LIMBS ‘I wanted to become head forester once.’ ‘So you may still’, I assure him. ‘There are splendid artificial limbs now; you’d hardly know there was anything missing. They are fixed on to the muscles. You can move the fingers and work and even write with an artificial hand. And besides, they will always be making improvements.’ (Erich M. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929)1 All Quiet on the Western Front is still considered by many to be ‘the greatest war novel of all time’.2 But in
The Malleable Body uses amputation and prostheses to tell a new story about medicine in early modern Europe. Drawing on surgical treatises and artifacts from the Holy Roman Empire, it reveals how the hands-on practices of surgeons, amputees, and artisans to treat the loss of limbs gradually changed ideas about artificially manipulating the body’s form. The expansion of gunpowder warfare in the sixteenth century caused injuries that required amputation on an unprecedented scale, pushing traditional, non-invasive medical practices to the breaking point and sparking surgical debates that grew into the seventeenth century. This book examines the tense moments in which surgeons, patients, families, and friends decided to operate and the complications of “phantom limbs” that could follow. It also uncovers surgeons’ visions of the body embedded in their technical instructions, exploring a form of practical knowledge-making fused with extreme human experiences. Yet surgeons were not the only ones experimenting with limbs: amputees who survived the dangerous procedure took inspiration from art and craft to manage new body shapes and shape the perceptions of others. Artifacts of mechanical hands show that those with the means commissioned artisans to fashion prostheses. These efforts drew clockmakers, locksmiths, woodworkers, and others into the development of a new prosthetic technology that influenced surgeons’ discussions. Two centuries of surgical and artisanal interventions forged a growing perception, fundamental to biomedicine today, that humans could alter the body—that it was malleable.
137 6 ITINERANT MANIPULATORS AND PUBLIC BENEFACTORS: ARTIFICIAL LIMB PATENTS, MEDIC AL PROFESSIONALISM AND THE MORAL ECONOMY IN ANTEBELLUM AMERIC A Caroline Lieffers ‘The legal right is, of course, not disputed; the moral right is by no means so clear.’ So wrote Robert Arthur, a professor at the Philadelphia College of Dental Surgery, in 1853.1 Arthur was referring to the practice of patenting, which was at the centre of contentious debates to define ethics and etiquette in a variety of health professions in nineteenth-century America. The legal right was in
sensations of the very body parts that had been removed. For the amputees who survived, malleability in a basic sense was conceived as a response to this bodily change. Iron arms show us this was much more complicated than an attempt to return to a sense of “wholeness.” In a world in which artificial limbs had yet to be medicalized, amputees with the desire and means to obtain prostheses made individual decisions about the forms these objects would take. The artisans they charged with making them approached malleability from their
In 1575, Ambroise Paré published an image displaying the internal mechanisms of an iron hand. It was one of four illustrations of mechanical limbs—two hands, an arm, and one leg—that appeared in his book of artificial body parts within his monumental surgical treatise, Les Oeuvres . 1 He provided readers with woodcuts of artificial limbs that could, as he wrote in the chapter preface, “perform voluntary motions following nature as closely as art can.” 2 The designs
out the door at passersby rather than describing their own firsthand experiences. Indeed, authors of surgical treatises who devoted detailed attention to post-operative convalescence said little of patient interactions afterwards. They do not provide instructions or offer case histories about working with amputees to regain mobility or learn new ways to perform everyday tasks. 79 Evidence that surgeons were involved in the process of acquiring artificial limbs is likewise vanishingly small. Medicalized rehabilitation of
today’s high-tech myoelectric limb prostheses and cochlear 3 Introduction 3 ear implants clearly differ from the relatively low-tech artificial limbs and h earing trumpets of the nineteenth century, this collection outlines the remarkable similarities between the commercial processes involved in successfully getting these seemingly different products to market. Yet, by taking a commodification approach, this collection does not seek to privilege its significance over and above other interpretive frameworks, or to suggest that historians have neglected economic