Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics (review)

The history of prosthetics has received substantial attention during the past decade, but no work until now has taken up the challenges of offering a cross-disciplinary review of the subject, rooting it in terms of material culture, and charting a course for future research. Artificial Parts, Practical Lives is a path-breaking volume that achieves these goals admirably and in doing so takes a welcome aim at psychoanalytic theory and contemporary cultural studies in order to connect prostheses with people and their subjective needs. Here is an engaging work that deserves to find a wide readership in the fields represented by its contributors, including history, sociology, anthropology, American studies, science and technology studies, and gender and queer studies. This book will also be of interest to professionals engaged in prosthetics and the allied fields of orthotics, surgery, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and recreational therapy.

The strength of this volume is due largely to Katherine Ott's introduction. Her historiographic overview of the subject is the most comprehensive published to date. It contextualizes the work splendidly, setting a new standard for thinking and writing about prosthetics in terms of "need," "design," and "use and representation." These categories structure the essays that follow, and every one in its own way helps to fulfill the promise of the volume to foreground the "materiality of the body" without relying heavily on the useful yet problematic field of material culture studies. Equally important, every contribution stays far afield from Whiggish interpretations that too often haunt histories of artificial parts and the lives they affect.

Section 1, "Need," includes essays by David Serlin, Heather Perry, Kirsten Gardner, and Jennifer Davis McDaid. It offers analyses of "circumstances related to a need for an artificial part" (p. 32). Among the subjects skillfully explored are Germany's rehabilitation of its veterans during the First World War, Confederate veterans and artificial limbs in Virginia, and the development of breast prostheses up to the postwar era. In section 2, "Design," Katherine Ott, Elizabeth Haiken, Alex Faulkner, and Steven Kurzman "discuss the cultural and individual pressures on the professionals who engineer the prosthesis" (pp. 32-33). Here readers will learn about the formation of the ocularist profession, socioeconomic issues surrounding the development of hip prostheses, and cultural attitudes toward cosmetic prostheses, among other subjects. The final section, "Use and Representation," examines "the relationship of prosthesis to the practicalities of everyday life" (p. 33). Essays by Elspeth Brown, Stephen Mihm, David Waldstreicher, and Roman Srinivasan analyze such prosthetic creations as Benjamin Franklin's "long arm," the Jaipur foot, and "presentable" limbs for members of the middle class in nineteenth-century America.

While every essay in this collection makes a valuable contribution, those by Serlin, Brown, and Kurzman deserve a spotlight. Serlin offers a provocative analysis of the relationship between postwar prosthetics and masculinity in America to reveal new and important intersections between technology and gender. Brown's essay, arguably the most innovative contribution of the volume, explores the "prosthetics of management" using the motion studies of the American efficiency expert Frank Gilbreth. Alongside Serlin's work and Ott's introduction, this essay goes far to show how new histories of prosthetics can be written. Kurzman's analysis of the communication between the amputee and the prosthetist situates prosthetics in a vital contemporary context. He illustrates complex social relations that emerge in a prosthetic shop; at the same time, he suggests thought-provoking questions about contemporary caregiver-patient relations in an era of rising health-care and insurance costs. Kurzman's research in this area is vital and will certainly remain so, given the fact that while more individuals are in need of prostheses (and orthoses), fewer individuals are entering the...