Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics

The Sum of Its Parts: An Introduction to Modern Histories of Prosthetics

The Sum of Its Parts An Introduction to Modern Histories of Prosthetics Katherine Ott HISTORIES OF PROSTHETICS are probably better written by playwrights than by historians. The stories are full of contradiction, emotion , creativity, intrigue, and myth, gestures that are fraught with meaning , and sometimes improbable (but more often than not, tedious) events. There is the young woman, a double leg amputee, deciding what height she would like to be and her preferred shoe size as she is fitted with new legs. Another young woman, born without arms and legs, decides to forgo the use of any prosthetic limbs. Police in 1905 arrest a notorious woman who rides in public conveyances and uses arti- ficial arms and hands seemingly to read a book, while her real hands pick the pockets of commuters seated beside her. In Tokyo, a yakuza decides to leave the gangster brotherhood but needs to replace the finger cut off during initiation. A1930s housewife, recovering from cancer surgery , struggles to pay attention as her physician explains how to sew an artificial breast. A twelve-year-old wunderkind cellist inadvertently leaves her custom-made arm in a New York City taxicab. Soldiers in 1865, 1898, 1918, 1945, 1953, and 1968 wait for the government paperwork that will pay for their prostheses. What ties all these people together , besides visible bodily difference, is that each person enlists and integrates artificial parts in the practical details of daily living.1 The characters in this anthology are not cyborgs or bionic beings. Nor are they merely metaphors for empire, nationhood, or modernist anomie. Prostheses can certainly fill all those roles. In scholarly literature, prostheses usually perform cultural work unrelated to the 1 practicalities of everyday life. One does not need real people to do a deep metaphorical analysis of symbolic forms; in many cases, putting real people into these scenarios would subvert or nullify the analysis. Prosthetic devices, as social objects with a complex set of meanings in the daily lives of people, have rarely, if ever, been understood as part of vernacular material life. The essays in this anthology propose a historical perspective in order to provide a corrective to the vogue for prosthetics as found in psychoanalytic theory and contemporary cultural studies. Many scholars use the term “prosthesis” regularly, and often reductively, as a synonym for common forms of body-machine interface. This occurs most explicitly in discussions of the cyborg, especially as introduced by scholars of science and technology studies like Donna Haraway.2 Books such as Celia Lury’s Prosthetic Culture or Gabriel Brahm and Mark Driscoll’s anthology Prosthetic Territories use prostheses metaphorically 2 KATHERINE OTT FIG. I.1. This late-20th-century leg, made and worn for fifteen years by Deroy Hill of South Carolina, captures the serendipity and opportunism in the lives of many prosthesis wearers. In self-reliant, do-it-yourself fashion, Hill framed his leg with wire and steel and kept it stuffed with cloth scraps as needed. Similarly, until the 1970s, it was common for women to sew their own breast prostheses. Although little else is known about Hill, his individuality and personality are strongly evident in his leg. Courtesy of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. to discuss artificial objects that mediate human relations.3 In these studies , which owe much to the critical work on technologies of self making proposed by Michel Foucault, any machine or technology that intervenes on human subjectivity, such as a telephone, a computer, or a sexual device, can be said to be prosthetic.4 As Kathy Woodward has written , “[T]echnology serves fundamentally as a prosthesis of the human body, one that ultimately displaces the material body.”5 Such assertions, while intellectually provocative and culturally insightful, hardly begin to comprehend the complex historical and social origins of prosthetics. Cyborg theorists who use the term “prosthesis” to describe cars and tennis rackets rarely consider the rehabilitative dimension of prosthetics , or the amputees who use them. To a certain extent, prostheses do illustrate a type of body-machine interface emblematic of modern culture . What, after all, could be a greater expression of modern anomie than the worker or soldier who, after losing his or her arm to modern warfare or an industrial accident, gets a replacement limb fabricated of synthetic materials? Analysis and interpretation of prostheses have also come from psychoanalytic theory. Thinkers as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Jacques...