Artificial Parts, Practical Lives
Modern Histories of Prosthetics

Katherine Ott (Edited by), David Serlin (Edited by), Stephen Mihm (Edited by)

9780814761984

Paperback / softback, published 1 April 2002

359 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.522 kg

"These essays are valuable first forays into the history of prosthetics." (Technology and Culture)

From the wooden teeth of George Washington to the Bly prosthesis, popular in the 1860s and boasting easy uniform motions of the limb, to today's lifelike approximations, prosthetic devices reveal the extent to which the evolution and design of technologies of the body are intertwined with both the practical and subjective needs of human beings.
The peculiar history of prosthetic devices sheds light on the relationship between technological change and the civilizing process of modernity, and analyzes the concrete materials of prosthetics which carry with them ideologies of body, ideals, body politics, and culture.
Simultaneously critiquing, historicizing, and theorizing prosthetics, Artificial Parts, Practical Lives lays out a balanced and complex picture of its subject, neither vilifying nor celebrating the merger of flesh and machine.