This book 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.
Table of Content
1. Modern prostheses in Anglo-American commodity cultures: an introduction – Claire L. Jones
Part I. The commodification of hearing aids and aids to hearing
2. Purchase, use and adaptation: interpreting ‘patented’ aids to the deaf in Victorian Britain – Graeme Gooday and Karen Sayer
3. Between cure and prosthetic: ‘good fit’ in artificial eardrums – Jaipreet Virdi-Dhesi
4. Inventing amplified telephony: the co-creation of aural technology and disability – Coreen Mc Guire
Part II. The commodification of artificial limbs and associated appliances
5. ‘A hand for the one-handed’: user-inventors and the market for assistive technologies in early nineteenth-century Britain – Laurel Daen
6. ‘Get the best article in the market’: prostheses for women in nineteenth-century literature and commerce – Ryan Sweet
7. Itinerant manipulators and public benefactors: artificial limb patents, medical professionalism and the moral economy in antebellum America – Caroline Lieffers
8. Separating the surgical and commercial: Space, prosthetics and the First World War – Julie Anderson
Index
About the author
Julie Anderson is a Senior Lecturer in the History Department at the University of Kent
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