Prosthetic reconstructions: Making the industry, re-making the body, modelling the nation

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 44, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 22-57

  Herschbach, Lisa ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 53249151840     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/1997.44.22     Document Type: Article

References (123)

1. Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon, New York, 1993, pp. 3-4.
2. My thoughts on the literal and symbolic meanings of dismemberment and remembering after the American Civil War are deeply indebted to Seth Koven's study of the intertwined histories of crippled children and wounded soldiers in Great Britain following World War I. See his 'Remembering and dismemberment: crippled children, wounded soldiers, and the Great War in Great Britain', American Historical Review 99:4, October 1994, pp. 1,167-1,202.
3. Concern over the dependency of the veteran amputee inspired a popular poem of the era titled 'The Empty Sleeve'. The poem is overtly critical of the physical sacrifices demanded by Union service, suggesting the transgressive potential of visible amputation. It reads: See over yonder all day he stands - An empty sleeve in the soft wind sways. And he holds his lonely left hand out For charity at the crossing ways And this is how with bitter shame, He begs his bread and hardly lives; So wearily he ekes out the sum A proud and grateful country gives What matter that a wife and child Cry softly for that good arm rent? And wonder why that random shot To him, their own beloved, was sent? Edward Carey Gardiner Collection, (n.d.). Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. I am grateful to Patrick Kelly for bringing this poem to my attention.
4. The classic interpretation of the Civil War as an 'irrepressible conflict' between the industrial North and the agricultural South is found in Charles and Mary Beard's 'The Second American Revolution' in The Rise of American Civilization, vol. 2, chaps 18 and 20, New York, 1930.
5. For a recent but more reserved endorsement of this view that takes into account opposing interpretations, see Roger Ransom, Conflict and Compromise: The Political Economy of Slavery, Emancipation, and the American Civil War, New York, 1989, pp. 253-84.
6. Henry W. Bellows to B. Frank Palmer, 10 July 1862. Reprinted in Palmer, The Palmer arm & leg; correspondence with the Surgeon-General, U.S.A. and the Chief of Bureau of Medicine & Surgery U.S.N. with letters from eminent surgeons, and a communication from B. Frank Palmer to the Board of Surgeons convened to decide on the best patent artificial limbs to be adopted for use by the Army and Navy of the U.S., Philadelphia, 1862, p. 10.
7. Although both Federal and Confederate armies used a wide range of weapons, from knives and swords to heavy field artillery, the musket was the major tactical weapon of the war. Gunsmiths began to rifle or groove the barrels of muskets in 1814. In combination with new expansive bullets, which were conical balls with hollow bases, rifling increased tremendously the accuracy and range of the musket during the Civil War. Additional developments in the method of loading the musket, from muzzle- to breach-loading, shortened the length of loading time and increased the volume of fire during skirmishes. For a detailed discussion of these developments, see Carl L. Davis, Arming the Union: Small Arms in the Civil War, New York, 1973.
8. As J. Julian Chisolm wrote in the 1864 edition of his Confederate Manual of Military Surgery, 'frightful wounds are produced by the minie ball, which require all the resources of surgery to manage successfully.' Columbia, SC, 1864, p. 119.
9. Emphasis in original. Medical practice at mid-century adhered to the principles of what was known as 'conservative therapeutics,' which sought to preserve the integrity of the body, sparing diseased or wounded members whenever possible and resorting to mutilation only as a last resort. Civil War physicians, however, made therapeutic choices based on a calculus of option and risk recalibrated by the vicissitudes of military medical work. When treating men whose arms and legs had already been opened by bullets, in understaffed field and base hospitals plagued by epidemics of gangrene, tetanus, pyemia and other infections, amputation was itself recast as conservative; as preserving life rather than sabotaging the body. A Union surgeon writing in 1864 explained, 'Life is better than a limb; and too often mutilation is the only alternative to a rapid and painful death'. Quoted in Laurann Figg and Jane Farrell-Beck, 'Amputation in the Civil War: Physical and Social Dimensions', Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 48: 4, October 1993, p. 453.
10. The classic study of Northern army medical practice remains George Worthington Adams, Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army, New York, 1952.
11. On Confederate medicine, see H.H. Cunningham, Doctors in Gray: The Confederate Medical Service, Baton Rouge, 1958.
12. The U.S. Sanitary Commission recommended amputation when the limb was badly lacerated or had sustained a compound fracture. Chisolm advised Confederate surgeons to amputate when the limb had been carried off by a cannon ball, leaving a ragged stump; when the limb or joint was crushed, although still attached to the body; when major vessels and nerves were torn, even if the bone was intact; when soft tissue had been severely lacerated or skin extensively destroyed, hindering healing; or when gangrene had set in. Manual Mil. Surg., p. 410.
13. On the use of anesthesia by American surgeons, see Martin Pernick, The Calculus of Suffering: Pain, Professionalization and Anesthesia in Nineteenth-Century America, New York, 1985.
14. Three-quarters of all operations were amputations. See Joseph K. Barnes, George Otis, and D.L. Huntington, The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, Part III, Vol. II, Surgical History, chaps 10-12, Washington, 1883;
15. Thomas F. Cullen, 'Observations on the Influence of the Present War upon American Medicine and Surgery', Transactions of the Medical Society of New Jersey 98, 1864, pp. 21-44.
16. The staggering rates of amputation and consequent disability prompted some of the war's most heated medical-surgical debates, between conservative and heroic physicians, over the abuse of amputation as a therapeutic procedure. See Adams's overview in Doctors in Blue, chap. 6.
17. Figg and Farrell-Beck, 'Amputation in the Civil War', p. 454.
18. Mortality statistics varied widely; they were classified according to time lapsed following injury, part of the body injured, and type of surgical procedure employed. According to official Union records, the mortality rate for amputation at the hip performed more than twenty-four hours after wounding was as high as 100%; amputation through the ankle had a mortality rate of 25%. Compiled from the Medical and Surgical History by Norman T. Kirk in, 'The Development of Amputation', Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 32, 1944, pp. 131-63.
19. Oliver Wendell Holmes, 'The human wheel, its spokes and felloes', Atlantic Monthly 11:67, May 1863, pp. 567-580.
20. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States, Cambridge, MA, 1992, chaps 1 and 2.
21. Palmer, 'To the Mutilated Soldier', in The palmer arm & leg, p. 4.
22. These numbers compiled by Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, p. 140.
23. See also, William Glasson, 'The South's Care for Her Confederate Veterans', American Monthly Review of Reviews 36, 1907, pp. 40-47.
24. For a description of the opulence in which Marks lived in the 1870s, ensconced in a mansion on the banks of Long Island sound, see 'Art Practically Exemplified', Stamford Advocate, November 1875.
25. The authors of the introduction to a new edition of the 1889 trade catalogue of George Tiemann & Company point out that the sudden huge demand generated by the Civil War 'made the fortunes of several instrument-making firms, especially those close to the medical purveyors in Philadelphia and New York'. Tiemann and Company made handsome profits by supplying regulation operating sets to the U.S. Army Medical Department as well. See F. Terry Hambrecht and James M. Edmonson, 'Introduction', in George Tiemann & Co., The American Armamentarium Chirurgicum, Boston, 1989, p. 16.
26. Palmer, 'To the Mutilated Soldier', p. 4.
27. Palmer, The palmer arm & leg, pp. 4-9.
28. In an attempt to match Palmer, the manufacturer A.A. Marks also began to preface his trade catalogues with an autobiographical recounting. 'Glimpse at the Past' provided a similar heroic narrative of technological ingenuity joined with 'indefatigable devotion' to his purpose, although Marks was not maimed himself. 'Having restored the cripple to a condition in which he could walk, labor, and thrive', asserts Marks, 'was the reward for the sacrifice'. See A Treatise on Marks' Patent Artificial Limbs with Rubber Hands and Feet, New York, 1894, pp. 7-12.
29. On the narrative conventions and social uses of Horatio Alger stories, see Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920, Chicago, 1978, pp. 140-146.
30. Audrey Davis, Triumph Over Disability: The Development of Rehabilitation Medicine in the U.S.A., Washington, 1973, p. 4.
31. Holmes, 'The human wheel', p. 567-8.
32. The 'Patent Claims' section of Scientific American during these years gives a sense of the proliferation of the industry. In the fifteen years from 1846 through 1860, thirty-four patents for new or improved artificial limbs, crutches and invalid chairs were recorded. From 1861 to 1873, 133 patents for limbs, crutches and invalid chairs were recorded. From 1861 to 1873, 133 patents for limbs and assisting devices were issued, a 290% increase. Inventors and manufacturers catered to the needs of amputee veterans with additional products that ranged from a combination knife and fork for arm amputees to a hand-powered tricycle for leg amputees. See the Subject-matter Index of Patents for Inventions Issued by the United States Patent Office from 1790 to 1873, Inclusive, New York, 1976.
33. B. Franklin Palmer, 'The National Benefaction - $500,000!', in The human wheel, its spokes and felloes. Value of the Palmer limbs, established by a thousand testimonials. History of the National Benefaction. Selections from 1860 to 1870, Philadelphia, January 1870, pp. 1-2. Palmer appropriated both Holmes' Atlantic Monthly article and its title for his own commercial purposes, reprinting the piece (presumably with Holmes' sanction) as part of his 1870 trade catalogue. Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.
34. This approach to provision on the part of the U.S. government appeared 'meager' and 'unenlightened' to early-twentieth-century rehabilitators. (See, for example, W.S. Bainbridge, Report on Medical and Surgical Developments of the War, Washington, 1919, p. 163.) Casting our sights backward rather than forward reveals a very different view however. As Theda Skocpol points out, pension and limb provision appear 'legally liberalized, socially far-reaching, [and] costly' in comparison to previous policy.
35. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, p. 105.
36. Davis, Triumph, p. 32.
37. William H. Rideing, 'Patched-up humanity', Appleton's Journal, 19 June 1875, p. 784.
38. 'The Surgeon General's Order on Artificial Limbs', Washington, 13 May 1865.
39. Figg and Farrell-Beck, 'Amputation in the Civil War', p. 463.
40. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America, New York, 1995, pp. 102, 109.
41. A.A. Marks, 'A few who wear them: what they do and where they live', New York, c. 1890. By permission of the Warshaw Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
42. Quoted in Rideing, 'Patched-up humanity', p. 784.
43. Quoted in A.A. Marks, Marks' Patent Artificial Limbs with Rubber Hands and Feet, New York, 1884, p. 109.
44. Quoted in Charles F. Stansbury, 'Argument on Behalf of the Applicant', in Palmer, 'The human wheel, p. 8. Emphasis in original.
45. For a discussion of the mid-century emergence of a new definition of 'Marketplace Manhood' that derived masculine identity from business success, replacing older models of manhood based on Jeffersonian ideals of the yeoman farmer and independent artisan, see Michael Kimmel, 'Consuming Manhood: The Feminization of American Culture and the Recreation of the Male Body, 1832-1920', Michigan Quarterly Review 33:1, 1994, pp. 7-36.
46. On the explosion of leisure activities in the urban North after the Civil War, see Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era, New York, 1993, pp. 282-83;
47. and Rodgers, Work Ethic, pp. 102-114. As Rodgers points out, the rise of a new industrial work ethic led to an increasing segregation of work and play into distinct categories in place of an older interfusion of free and work time. Yet the cult of the marketplace and of strenuosity grew ever more intertwined, 'minimizing the distinctions between usefulness and sport, toil and recreation, the work ethic and the spirit of play' (p. 109).
48. See, for example, 'Information for strangers visiting the city', in Marks, Patent Artificial Limbs, p. 109.
49. On the relationship between the growth of the rail network and of retail business, see Wolfgang Shivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century, Berkeley, 1986, chap. 13 especially.
50. Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900, Cambridge, MA, 1989, p. 86.
51. During the 1870s and 1880s, both Palmer and Marks moved their galleries and factories several times. Marks, for example, moved from 575 Broadway to 691 Broadway, and then finally to his most capacious six-floor offices and factory at 701 Broadway, near 4th Street. Broadway boasted an impressive collection of artificial limb show-rooms and shops: Bly had an address of 658 Broadway; and Palmer was located at the corner of Astor Place and Broadway. In Philadelphia, Palmer was joined on Chestnut Street by limb makers Richard Clement and James Foster.
52. The New York Times, 6 Oct. 1860.
53. Quoted in Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans, New York, 1989, p. 39.
54. Holmes, 'The human wheel', p. 577.
55. For an excellent analysis of the production of a mythical image of the 'illustrious American' in the photographic studio of Mathew Brady, see Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, chap. 1.
56. Brady's gallery was situated just a few blocks from Marks' Broadway showroom. William Leach provides a useful overview of the techniques of display in late-nineteenth century show windows. See his 'Strategists of Display and the Production of Desire', in Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880-1920, Simon J. Bronner (ed.), New York, 1989, pp. 99-132.
57. On world exhibitions as 'pilgrimages to the commodity fetish', to borrow Walter Benjamin's phrase, see Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914, Stanford, 1990;
58. and Robert Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916, Chicago, 1984.
59. Simon J. Bronner, 'Reading Consumer Culture', in Consuming Visions, pp. 50-51.
60. A writer for the London Times likewise reported: 'Among the prize winners that attracted attention at the fair was a sample artificial leg manufactured by B. Frank Palmer'. Clipping on file at Division of Medical Sciences, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
61. It was such a hit among fair-goers that managers repeated the event the following day. See the New York Tribune, 16 Oct. 1865.
62. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, New York, 1982, p. 133.
63. Douglas Bly, The Principles of the Natural Leg in the Artificial One, Rochester, 1862, p. 3. By permission of the Warshaw Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
64. 'The modern artificial leg is a complete illusion,' observes Appleton's Journal. 'The wearer himself may easily forget its unreality.'
65. Rideing, 'Patched-up humanity,' p. 783.
66. For an excellent analysis of the poetics of American world's fairs, see Rydell, All the World's a Fair. According to Rydell, the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in particular should be read as a calculated response to the economic and political uncertainties of the Reconstruction years. Fair organizers 'emphasized national unity', and sought to restore confidence in the vitality of America's social and economic structures (pp. 11-12).
67. Holmes, 'The human wheel', p. 571.
68. Bly, Principles, p. 5.
69. The list of similar examples could be lengthened. For instance, among the 'Centennial Testimonials to the Clement Leg', we find the claim that 'The anatomical structure of nature is faithfully reproduced'. 'Springs, bands, and other mechanical contrivances serving in the place, and fulfilling readily, certainly, and without exertion of any sort the purposes of muscles, sinews and tendons in the original flesh and bone.' Philadelphia, 1876, p. 6. By permission of the Warshaw Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
70. Erin O'Connor, 'Fractions of Men: Engendering Amputation in Victorian Culture', Representations, forthcoming 1997, p. 18. Manuscript in possession of the author. My analysis of the discourse of the machine-body deployed by artificial-limb advertisements in the nineteenth century draws heavily on O'Connor's work. I am especially indebted to her insight that prosthesis inverts the putative ontology of machine and organism; 'mechanizing the amputee in order to naturalize him', and producing 'an anatomy whose inner coherence derives from elision with an outside object' (p. 20). However my project diverges from the work of a literary scholar such as O'Connor in that I aim to situate the logic and dominant motifs of prosthesis within a particular techno-scientific, political and historical context: that of a Northern culture mobilizing for and then memorializing its involvement in the American Civil War.
71. Rideing, 'Patched-up humanity', p. 783.
72. O'Connor, 'Fragments of Men', pp. 20-21.
73. The metaphor of the machine in physiology has roots in Aristotle's thought and was well established by the time Vesalius described the human organism as a 'factory' in the mid-sixteenth century. French Enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes and La Mettrie made wellknown contributions to the mechanical representation of the body. For an historical overview of such analogic thinking, see Georges Canguilhem, 'Machine and Organism', in Incorporations (New York, 1992), pp. 44-69.
74. Originally published in German as Mechanik der Menschlichen Gehwerkzeuge: Eine Anatomische-Physiologische Untersuchung, Göttingen, 1836,
75. the treatise first appeared in English translation in 1848. It has recently been reprinted in English as Mechanics of the Human Walking Apparatus, Paul Maquet and Ronald Furlong (trans.), New York, 1992.
76. Weber and Weber, Mechanics, Maquet and Furlong (trans.), pp. 3, 47.
77. Holmes, 'The human wheel', p. 569.
78. O'Connor, 'Fragments of Men', p. 21. O'Connor makes this point of prosthesis, but overlooks the way in which the process of substitution was enabled and reinforced by stereoscopic and stereographic photography.
79. Oliver Wendell Holmes, 'The stereoscope and the stereograph', Atlantic Monthly 3, June 1859, p. 748.
80. Weber and Weber, Mechanics, Maquet and Furlong (trans.), p. 2.
81. Holmes, 'The human wheel', p. 574.
82. O'Connor, 'Fragments of Men', p. 20.
83. Marks, A Treatise, p. 14.
84. Bly, Principles, p. 4.
85. Marks, A Treatise, pp. 16-17.
86. Palmer to General W.A. Hammond, Surgeon-General U.S. Washington, D.C. Reprinted in Palmer, The human wheel, p. 5.
87. Holmes, 'The human wheel', pp. 575, 577.
88. Jean-Claude Beaune, 'The Classical Age of Automata: An Impressionistic Survey from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century', Ian Patterson (trans.), in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, vol. I, Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaff and Nadiz Tazi (eds), New York, 1989, p. 437.
89. See 'The mechanics of the walking apparatus finds an application in the marching of troops', in Weber and Weber, Mechanics, Maquet and Furlong (trans.), p. 4.
90. Quoted in Egal Feldman, Fit for Men: A Study of New York's Clothing Trade, Washington, 1960.
91. Davis, Triumph, p. 32.
92. Merritt Roe Smith, 'Army Ordnance and the 'American system'' of Manufacturing, 1815-1861', in Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience, ed. Merritt Roe Smith, Cambridge, MA, 1985, pp. 39-86.
93. On critics of the ideology of interchangeable parts, and the reorganization of the system of labour it engendered, see John Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776-1900, New York, 1976.
94. Holmes, 'The human wheel', p. 568.
95. Bly, Principles, p. 19.
96. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine, p. 139.
97. Rideing, 'Patched-up humanity', pp. 783-34.
98. Charles F. Stansbury to Hon. Philip F. Thomas, Commissioner of Patents, 'Testimony in the matter of the application of B. Frank Palmer', 22 Oct. 1862, p. 6.
99. (By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.) The nineteenth-century preoccupation with the aesthetics of prosthesis was abandoned by a subsequent generation. As Robert Whalen has illustrated, scientists, orthopedists and engineers involved in designing artificial limbs in the World War I period eschewed aesthetic considerations in favor of utilitarian efficiency: 'There was no point in trying to copy the human arm; it was the arm's use-value that had to be reproduced'. See his Butter Wounds: German Victims of the Great War, 1914-1919, Ithaca, 1984, p. 61.
100. Holmes, 'The human wheel', pp. 577, 579.
101. This distinction was drawn clearly by Ulysses S. Grant's aide, Horace Porter. Courage, Porter emphasized, falls into 'two grand divisions': moral courage and physical courage. Military life in general, and combat in particular, encourages 'something higher than physical courage, a species of moral courage, which recognizes the danger and yet overmasters the sense of fear'. See his The Philosophy of Courage', Century Magazine 36, June 1888, p. 248.
102. Holmes, 'The human wheel', p. 572.
103. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, New York, 1985, p. 115.
104. O'Connor, 'Fragments of Men', p. 24.
105. Palmer, The human wheel, p. 8. Emphasis in original. (By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.)
106. O'Connor, 'Fragments of Men', p. 22.
107. Rodgers, Work Ethic, p. 31.
108. On this point, see also Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War, New York, 1970, especially chap. 1.
109. Eugene Genovese has argued that the South was essentially a pre-capitalist society, unable to sustain an industrial revolution because of its 'non-market' labour system. 'Structural constraints blocked the South's road to a politically and militarily competitive economy.' See his The Political Economy of Slavery, New York, 1965.
110. Other historians have stressed the capitalist features of the southern economy. In response, Genovese has replaced his use of the term 'precapitalist' with the somewhat weaker claim that the South was 'in but not of the bourgeois world'. See Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism, New York, 1983.
111. Holmes, 'The human wheel', p. 572.
112. My thoughts on prosthesis and the production of difference were inspired by Walter Benn Michaels' discussion of the phenomenology of clothing size. As Michaels points out, the standardization of size 'involved not belonging to a group but being singled out'. See his 'An American Tragedy, or the Promise of American Life', Representations 25, Winter 1989, p. 84.
113. Professional men are represented in terms that rehearse those more enthusiastically applied to working-class men. Women are nearly entirely absent from this discourse, although Marks in particular advertised that his establishment had women on staff and separate fitting rooms for female clients. On the gendering of amputation and prosthesis, see Koven, 'Remembering and dismemberment',
114. and O'Connor, 'Fragments of Men'.
115. Carroll Pursell, The Machine in America, Baltimore, 1995, p. 187.
116. Davis, Triumph, p. 32.
117. Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology, Ithaca, 1977, pp. 334-35.
118. Figg-Farrell and Beck, 'Amputation in the Civil War', p. 464.
119. Whitelaw Reid, After the War: A tour of Southern States, 1865-06, New York, 1965, p. 155.
120. Gaines Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913, New York, 1987, p. 195. Confederate veteran amputees who recouped their battle losses by winning in the political arena included Francis T. Nichols of Louisiana and James Berry of Arkansas.
121. Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, pp. 116, 118.
122. Verne, From the Earth, p. 184.
123. Lisa Herschbach, '"True clinical fictions": medical and literary narratives from the Civil War hospital', Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 19, 1995, pp. 183-205.