Description

Book Synopsis
This book uses amputation and prostheses to tell a new story about medicine and embodied knowledge-making in early modern Europe. It draws on the writings of craft surgeons and learned physicians to follow the heated debates that arose from changing practices of removing limbs, uncovering tense moments in which decisions to operate were made. Importantly, it teases out surgeons’ ideas about the body embedded in their technical instructions. This unique study also explores the material culture of mechanical hands that amputees commissioned locksmiths, clockmakers, and other artisans to create, revealing their roles in developing a new prosthetic technology. Over two centuries of surgical and artisanal interventions emerged a growing perception, fundamental to biomedicine today, that humans could alter the body — that it was malleable.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1 Writing the craft of surgery
2 Communities face the cold fire
3 Visions of the body
4 After the operation
5 Mechanical hands
6 Prosthetic technology on the move
Epilogue
Index

The Malleable Body: Surgeons, Artisans, and

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    A Hardback by Heidi Hausse

    £999.99

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      Book details

      Publisher Manchester University Press
      Published 25 April 2023
      ISBN-13 9781526160652
      978-1526160652
      ISBN-10 152616065X
      Also in:
      Social and cultural history History of medicine Plastic and reconstructive surgery

      Description

      Book Synopsis
      This book uses amputation and prostheses to tell a new story about medicine and embodied knowledge-making in early modern Europe. It draws on the writings of craft surgeons and learned physicians to follow the heated debates that arose from changing practices of removing limbs, uncovering tense moments in which decisions to operate were made. Importantly, it teases out surgeons’ ideas about the body embedded in their technical instructions. This unique study also explores the material culture of mechanical hands that amputees commissioned locksmiths, clockmakers, and other artisans to create, revealing their roles in developing a new prosthetic technology. Over two centuries of surgical and artisanal interventions emerged a growing perception, fundamental to biomedicine today, that humans could alter the body — that it was malleable.

      Table of Contents

      Introduction
      1 Writing the craft of surgery
      2 Communities face the cold fire
      3 Visions of the body
      4 After the operation
      5 Mechanical hands
      6 Prosthetic technology on the move
      Epilogue
      Index

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