Artificial Parts, Practical Lives

From the wooden teeth of George Washington, to the so-called Bly prosthesis, popular in the 1860s and boasting easy uniform motions of the limb, to today's lifelike approximations, prosthetic devices reveal the extent to which the evolution and design of technologies of the body are intertwined with both the practical and subjective needs of human beings. Simultaneously critiquing, historicizing and theorizing prosthetics, this text lays out a balanced and complex picture of its subject, neither vilifying nor celebrating the merger of flesh and machine.