The malleable body: Surgeons, artisans, and amputees in early modern Germany

The malleable body: Surgeons, artisans, and amputees in early modern Germany
ISBN-10
1526160641
ISBN-13
9781526160645
Category
Medical
Pages
287
Language
English
Published
2023-04-25
Publisher
Manchester University Press
Author
Heidi Hausse

Description

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.

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