Search results
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.
1 INTRODUCTION: MODERN PROSTHESES IN ANGLO-A MERIC AN COMMODITY CULTURES Claire L. Jones Commodification in contemporary perspective The present-day relationship between disability, technology and commerce in the developed world is hugely intricate. While the medical-industrial complex develops ever more innovative forms of myoelectric limb prostheses, cochlear ear implants and other devices designed to alleviate physical impairment, market responses to these technologies and the views these responses embody are diverse. For some, prosthetic technologies
institutional libraries in New York and Toronto, medical collections in Copenhagen and Berlin and a garrison reading room in Gibraltar.2 Booksellers from Edinburgh to Philadelphia advertised the sale of the volume, and newspapers from Paris to Calcutta printed reviews.3 The Enchiridion’s geographic range was only equalled by its broad topical appeal. It was discussed in military magazines, literary weeklies, medical 94 94 Rethinking modern prostheses journals, mechanical periodicals and general-interest publications, such as The Gentleman’s Magazine, and Historical
14 5 ‘GET THE BEST ARTICLE IN THE MARKET’: PROSTHESES FOR WOMEN IN NINETEENTH-C ENTURY LITERATURE AND COMMERCE Ryan Sweet Published during the aftermath of the American Civil War, Alonzo Hill’s John Smith’s Funny Adventures on a Crutch (1869) was a novel that provided a conspicuously gendered role model for maimed American veterans in the form of its eponymous protagonist. ‘[B]ear[ing] his mark with a patriotic sense of humor, and thereby scorn[ing] those who ignore his manly vigor’, the narrator- protagonist of Hill’s novel praises the work of prosthetist B
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.
, ‘threw the match away with an ease one would associate with a person not suffering from any disability’.1 To the audience, this veteran epitomised the restoration of function that was brought about by innovations in prosthetics during the First World War. There is no doubt that a significant number of British soldiers and sailors who experienced amputation in the First World War had an improved life experience owing to the provision of prostheses. More than 40,000 men suffered some form of limb loss.2 It is this scale of amputation that led some historians to argue
Most early modern hand prostheses sit unnoticed in the shadowy corners of armor exhibits, in museum storerooms, or in private collections. Over the last several decades, some have occasionally cropped up in exhibition catalogs or sourcebooks, which describe them as the curious precursors of modern artificial limbs. 1 Only recently have scholars begun to look more closely at these objects. 2 They pose as many challenges as they do opportunities for the study of the early
oldest manuscript of Götz’s narrative, which dates to no later than 1567, resides in the Berlichingen family archive in Jagsthausen, a small town in southwest Germany. Also in the Berlichingen collection are two mechanical right hands made of iron and purported to have belonged to Götz ( figures 5.5 – 5.6 ). 12 The knight only mentioned in passing his artificial hand—that “little aid” he first envisioned while in his sickbed. 13 A rare print edition of his autobiography appears alongside the sixteenth-century prostheses when
amputees, in which practitioners oversee physical therapy, occupational therapy, and adoption of prostheses, is a modern concept. 80 Early modern surgeons’ discussions of transitions out of post-operative convalescence do not necessarily reveal much about the experiences and perspectives of amputees. But they do shed light on medical thinking. Even more significant, they suggest that surgical discourse about amputees held broader implications for how practitioners conceived of the body, and of interventions that could be made to it
. Claire L.Jones, in her recent work on prostheses and commodity cultures, has argued that prostheses were familiar by the Victorian period, and social and cultural categories of disability and/or impairment could now be standardised if different functional capacities of the body required normalising, as could the degree of normalisation. 7 Alun Withey similarly situates spectacles within a much broader context: a range of devices being used from the eighteenth century to help mould or shape the body to conform