Amputations, iron hands, wooden legs: A history of artificial body parts

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Amputations, iron hands, wooden legs: A history of artificial body parts
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Prostheses have been around for hundreds of years.

Knight with the iron hand — the "Iron Hand" of Goetz von Berlichingen; made by a goldsmith — all fingers could be moved individually. . What makes this possible is not just complicated technology and delicate surgical procedures. It’s also an idea — that humans can and should alter patients’ bodies in supremely difficult and invasive ways. Where did that idea come from?of a surgeon grimly approaching a wounded soldier with saw in hand.

Yet, a momentous change in practices surrounding limb loss and how to deal with it started much earlier — in 16th- and 17th-century Europe.around 500 years ago. Europeans went from hesitating to perform amputations and few options for limb prostheses in 1500 to multiple amputation methods and complex iron hands for the affluent by 1700.

Amputation was seen as a last resort because of the high risk of death. But some Europeans started to believe they could use it along with artificial limbs to. This notion, breaking from a millennia-long tradition of noninvasive healing, still influences modern biomedicine by giving physicians the idea that crossing the physical boundaries of the patient’s body to drastically change it and embed technology into it could be a good thing.

While some wanted to save as much of the healthy body as possible, others insisted it was more important to reshape limbs so patients could use prostheses. For the first time European surgeons advocatedbased on the placement and use of artificial limbs. They were looking at the body not as something the surgeon should simply preserve, but rather as something the surgeon could mold..

This technology drew from surprising places, including locks, clocks and luxury handguns. Amputees commissioned prostheses from scratch by venturing into the craft market. As one 16th century contract between an amputee and aIron hands were important carriers of ideas. They prompted surgeons to think about prosthesis placement when they operated and created optimism about what humans could achieve with artificial limbs.

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