‘A Hand for the One-Handed’: Prosthesis User-Inventors and the Market for Assistive Technologies in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain

This chapter adds to historical studies of artificial body parts by exploring the reciprocal relationship between fictional texts and the prosthesis industry in nineteenth-century Britain and America. Focussing primarily on prostheses—including artificial legs, dentures, and glass eyes—in relation to female users, it demonstrates that fictional writing was a key component of nineteenth-century prosthesis discourse. The chapter argues that literary stories provided practical advice for readers on the kinds of prostheses that should be avoided for both social and functional purposes. Women in particular were targeted as consumers who should pay special attention when choosing prostheses. Popular literary sources, often packaged as marriage plots, provided kinds of advertisements not for but against certain prostheses. Meanwhile, both entire fictional works and particular representational strategies were used by contemporary prosthetists interchangeably as means through which to subtly disparage the devices of opposing makers, reinforce the proprietary ownership of particular designs, or promote the concealing abilities of particular devices to female users.

Inventing Amplified Telephony: The Co-Creation of Aural Technology and Disability

Amplified telephony was introduced to the UK by the General Post Office in an attempt to provide ‘hard of hearing’ individuals access to telephone communications during the inter-war years. In defining deafness as an inability to engage with telephony, the Post Office used this technology to construct new thresholds of hearing loss. Through exploring the development of amplified telephones for ‘deaf subscribers’ I show how telephony was used as a tool in the categorisation of disability and how, in turn, telephone users modified such technology to fit their personal needs and identities. A growing number of histories of disability examine the multiple ways in which social contexts shape disability and ability. This analysis provides a new perspective on the fluid, technology influenced definitions of hearing and deafness. By conceptualising the amplified telephone as a prosthetic, this analysis uncovers some of the ways in which hearing and deafness were socially and technologically constructed in interwar Britain. Study of early twentieth century telephony redefines the relationship between technology, communications, and disability, broadening our historical understanding of deafness in particular.

‘Get the Best Article in the Market’: Prostheses for Women in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Commerce

In 1822, George Webb Derenzy, a former captain in the British army, published a volume titled Enchiridion: Or, A Hand for the One-Handed. The text highlighted what Derenzy called his ‘One-Handed Apparatus,’ a collection of twenty instruments that he had made after losing his arm in the Napoleonic Wars. Designed to ease his daily routines of washing, eating, writing, and socializing, Derenzy’s inventions included, among other items, an egg cup that tilted in any direction and a card-holder that fanned out and folded up for easy transportation. This chapter examines Derenzy’s motivations for publishing the Enchiridion; the responses he received from readers around the globe; and the presuppositions about gender and class that ultimately constrained his consumer appeal and profit. Derenzy chose to publish, not patent, his contraptions due to his charitable desires to share them with others with lost limbs. His focus on using his prostheses to reclaim aspects of his social respectability and manly independence that his impairments seemed to threaten, however, ended up alienating poor, middling, and female patrons and limiting his success as an entrepreneur and a philanthropist. Perhaps due to these marketing missteps, Derenzy experienced the plight of many physically-impaired people during the period; unable to profitably labour, he sustained a steady descent into poverty.

Purchase, Use and Adaptation : Interpreting ‘Patented’ Aids to the Deaf in Victorian Britain

While aids to hearing were ubiquitous in nineteenth century middle class culture, they have only recently attracted attention among historians.Many such devices were inscribed with patent markings officially approved by the London Patent Office. Others instead simply bore claims to expired patents or the name of apparent ‘patentees’: such inscriptions served to persuade prospective purchasers that certain devices were ‘genuine’ inventions. The purchase of hearing aids was thus subject to complex relationships between designers, users, and user-designers centred on issues of trust, identity and efficacy. Drawing on patent records, advertising, the writings of ‘deaf’ journalists and artefacts, this chapter explores the selling of hearing aids as both a commercial and cultural encounter. First it looks at how the Rein and Hawksley companies adopted different strategies with regard to patenting and engaging prospective customers. Second it examines how hard-of-hearing journalists critiqued the opportunist vendors that often cited patents in their ‘advertising’ as a guarantor of effectiveness. The chapter concludes by examining the lived experiences of hearing aids purchasers, showing how such research affords historians the opportunity to investigate the histories of the deaf and hard of hearing through the material culture they accessed, whether designed for them or sometimes even by them.

Between Cure and Prosthesis : ‘Good Fit’ in Artificial Eardrums

Placing the history of artificial eardrums against the backdrop of medical consumerism and advertising culture, this chapter reveals how the commericalisation of assistive technologies can blur the boundaries between prosthetics and cures. Unlike assistive aids to hearing, artificial eardrums were initially constructed as a surgical prosthetic, a replacement of a damaged part to become integrated with a user’s body. By the 1880s, however, the device captured the imagination of British and American inventors and new manufacturing firms who distanced the surgical mark of the device while still adhering to standards of its design. As the device was invisible to both the observer and the wearer, their promotion as ‘cure’ rendered deafness as a sigma, a misery that required medico-technological intervention to integrate the deaf person into hearing society.

Itinerant Manipulators and Public Benefactors: Artificial Limb Patents, Medical Professionalism and the Moral Economy in Antebellum America

In 1847 the American Medical Association introduced its Code of Ethics, which deemed it ‘derogatory to professional character … for a physician to hold a patent for any surgical instrument, or medicine’. This chapter examines how the American patent system and the AMA’s ethics influenced B.F. Palmer, who in 1846 received the first patent for an artificial limb in the United States. While Palmer’s extra-medical position helped him avoid ethical controversy, the patent system also reinforced his aspirations to professional stature as a ‘surgeon-artist’. In arguing for a patent extension in 1860, Palmer and his attorney framed the patent as a kind of social contract, asserting the surgeon-artist’s exclusive, expert, and philanthropic character and depicting a benevolent professionalism in close parallel with that of the AMA. Palmer appealed to the moral economies of patenting and medicine alike, yet his argument also cast the sentimental work of resolving impairment in the hard fiscal terms legible to the Commissioner of Patents. The surgeon-artist’s professionalism depended on an ethic of beneficent contribution to the public good, underwritten by the authority of medicine, protected by the patent, and measured against the costs of charity.

Introduction: Modern Prostheses in Anglo-American Commodity Cultures

This chapter provides an introduction to the commodification of prostheses in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain and United States. By addressing some of the main processes used to commodify prostheses - invention, design and production; use and consumption; and promotion and patenting – it highlights how the medical profession, surgical instruments makers and individuals with physical impairments not only participated in shaping markets for new and modified assistive devices, but by doing so, redefined what it meant to be ‘abled’ and ‘disabled’ in this period. It argues that the redefinition of disability in this period – as a medical affliction that needed to be ‘corrected’ – led to the rise of disability rights activism in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. The previously little explored history of prostheses commodification, introduced here, formed no small part in the rise of these movements.

Separating the Surgical and Commercial: Space, Prosthetics and the First World War

The First World War witnessed an unprecedented scale of amputation. Traditionally, it has been argued that design and innovation were a direct result of the numbers of prostheses required to re-embody the many thousands of amputees from the war. This chapter argues that innovations in artificial limbs were well-established in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, there were a number of reputable companies that maintained a good trade in artificial limbs. The surgical profession and the commercial arena, while aware of each other, operated separately in two spheres. The First World War physically narrowed this division, relocating the limb fitter and the surgeon in close proximity in specialist hospitals established for amputees. Many manufacturers, including some from overseas, were required to provide the amputee servicemen with limbs, yet the relationship between the two professions was not improved. Nevertheless, the specialist hospitals staffed with experts in surgical technique and artificial limb fitting benefitted a number of patients. Focusing on Queen Mary Roehampton Hospital, this chapter explores the relationship between physical spaces and professionals, and the impact that it has on medical care in the First World War.