Prostheses

by

Heidi Hausse

• LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780197768723-0049

Introduction

In the history of medicine, prostheses are artificial body parts. In contrast to orthoses, which aid the function of a part, prostheses replace the part entirely. While artificial limbs have garnered perhaps the most scholarly attention from historians, they are by no means the only devices to meet this definition. Artificial kidneys, breasts, hearts, and hips, for example, are prosthetic parts and technologies implanted inside the body. Historians use a range of approaches for considering prostheses as evidence of lived experience; the bearers of broader cultural ideas; products of significant shifts in technology, warfare, commerce, medicine, and government policy; and a lens to learn about communities. They have fruitfully used prostheses to focus on the relationship between the body and technology, health and disability, and gender and society. The most concentrated historical work has focused on two periods in which prosthetics industries developed at rapid speed: industrialization and warfare in the nineteenth century and the world wars of the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on the Great War. The connection between the damage of war and prostheses as a tool of rehabilitation and reintegration of injured veterans into society remains a common subject in the scholarship. The relationship between gender and labor is also a significant recurring theme, with a pronounced emphasis on masculinity and male prosthesis users. Historians also at times draw on rich interdisciplinary trends in disability studies, literary theory, and cultural studies, among others, which press the definition of “prosthesis” further into the metaphorical and theoretical. In this body of scholarship, prosthesis can become a discussion of extension or replacement of an entity (not necessarily of a human body part) in innumerable forms. Particularly influential in this strain of scholarship is the theory of narrative prosthesis, which identifies literary and filmic representations of disability—which can be of any perceived form of physical or mental difference—reproducing the idea that disability is deviant and must be rehabilitated or eliminated. While these discussions can take the historian far afield from the study of artificial body parts worn by people, their engagement with notions of impairment, disability, the normal and non-normal, and the detrimental effects of ableism remains useful. Whether discussed as a material object, a metaphor, or a theory of analysis, prostheses present scholars with a powerful way to examine human experience and thought at the intersection of the cultural, medical, and technological.

Overviews

Overviews of prostheses tend to focus on a specific type of artificial body part or are collections of specialized essays about several types of prosthetic parts. Ott, et al. 2002 is an influential example of the latter. Burhenne 2003 and Hawkins and Aquillano 2020 are wide-ranging exhibition catalogues. Knoche 2006 and Gutfleisch 2003 focus on lower limb prostheses, while Löffler 1984 examines upper limb prostheses. Putti 1930 is dated but still useful.

• Burhenne, Verena, ed. Prothesen von Kopf bis Fuß: Katalog zur gleichnamigen Wanderausstellung des Westfälischen Museumsamtes, Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe. Münster, Germany: Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe, 2003.

  This exhibition catalogue presents a vast array of artificial body parts, from artificial teeth and breasts to artificial legs and hearing devices. It offers a great introduction to extant artifacts.

• Gutfleisch, Oliver. “Peg Legs and Bionic Limbs: The Development of Lower Extremity Prosthetics.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 28.2 (2003): 139–148.

  DOI: 10.1179/030801803225010368

  Written from the perspective of a scientist and lower limb amputee, this essay is useful for its discussion of modern developments in leg prostheses.

• Hawkins, Amanda, and Sam Aquillano, eds. Bespoke Bodies: The Design & Craft of Prosthetics. Boston: Design Museum Everywhere, 2020.

  This catalogue of a traveling exhibition of the same name surveys the history, current state, and future of prosthetic designs in a global context, and it includes contributions from amputees and prosthetists.

• Knoche, Wilfried. Prothesen der unteren Extremität: Die Entwicklung vom Altertum bis 1930. In collaboration with Stefan Bieringer and Beat Rüttimann. Dortmund, Germany: Bundesfachschule für Orthopädie-Technik, 2006.

  Focuses on lower limb prostheses from Antiquity to the early twentieth century.

• Löffler, Liebhard. Der Ersatz für die obere Extremität: Die Entwicklung von den ersten Zeugnissen bis heute. Stuttgart: Enke, 1984.

  This book of upper limb prostheses from Antiquity through the twentieth century is a useful introduction.

• Ott, Katherine, David Serlin, and Stephen Mihm, eds. Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics. New York: New York University Press, 2002.

  A touchstone collection of essays with diverse chronological and topical foci. Pushes back against a heavily theorized and metaphorical use of prostheses in cultural studies to consider prosthetic devices as material objects containing clues to lived experience.

• Putti, Vittorio. Historic Artificial Limbs. New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 1930.

  While dated, Putti’s overview of limb prostheses from written, visual, and archaeological sources from the classical period (fourth century BCE) to the Renaissance (sixteenth century CE) remains useful for its illustrations and detailed descriptions of artifacts.