Rethinking modern prostheses in Anglo-American commodity cultures, 1820–1939

By Manchester University Press

This book explores the development of modern transatlantic prosthetic industries in nineteenth and twentieth centuries and reveals how the co-alignment of medicine, industrial capitalism, and social norms shaped diverse lived experiences of prosthetic technologies and in turn, disability identities.

Through case studies that focus on hearing aids, artificial tympanums, amplified telephones, artificial limbs, wigs and dentures, this book provides a new account of the historic relationship between prostheses, disability and industry. Essays draw on neglected source material, including patent records, trade literature and artefacts, to uncover the historic processes of commodification surrounding different prostheses and the involvement of neglected companies, philanthropists, medical practitioners, veterans, businessmen, wives, mothers and others in these processes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781526113542

Book preview

RETHINKING MODERN PROSTHESES

IN ANGLO-AMERICAN COMMODITY

CULTURES, 1820–1939

Series editors

Dr Julie Anderson, Professor Walton O. Schalick, III

This new series published by Manchester University Press responds to the growing interest in disability as a discipline worthy of historical research. The series has a broad international historical remit, encompassing issues that include class, race, gender, age, war, medical treatment, professionalisation, environments, work, institutions and cultural and social aspects of disablement including representations of disabled people in literature, film, art and the media.

Already published

Deafness, community and culture in Britain: leisure and cohesion, 1945–95

Martin Atherton

Destigmatising mental illness? Professional politics and public education in Britain, 1870–1970

Vicky Long

Fools and idiots? Intellectual disability in the Middle Ages

Irina Metzler

Framing the moron: the social construction of feeble-mindedness in the American eugenics era

Gerald V. O’Brien

Recycling the disabled: army, medicine, and modernity in WWI Germany

Heather R. Perry

Worth saving: disabled children during the Second World War

Sue Wheatcroft

RETHINKING MODERN

PROSTHESES IN ANGLO-AMERICAN

COMMODITY CULTURES,

1820–1939

Edited by Claire L. Jones

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2017

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 1 5261 0142 6 hardback

First published 2017

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Out of House Publishing

This volume is dedicated with respect, love and affection to my grandparents, Fred and Louise Callon. They met at Anerley Deaf School, London in the 1930s and it is through them that I came to understand, appreciate and value Deaf/deaf history and culture.

Contents

List of illustrations

Notes on contributors

Series editors’ foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction: modern prostheses in Anglo-American commodity cultures

Claire L. Jones

IThe commodification of hearing aids and aids to hearing

1Purchase, use and adaptation: interpreting ‘patented’ aids to the deaf in Victorian Britain

Graeme Gooday and Karen Sayer

2Between cure and prosthesis: ‘good fit’ in artificial eardrums

Jaipreet Virdi

3Inventing amplified telephony: the co-creation of aural technology and disability

Coreen McGuire

IIThe commodification of artificial limbs and associated appliances

4‘A hand for the one-handed’: prosthesis user-inventors and the market for assistive technologies in early nineteenth-century Britain

Laurel Daen

5‘Get the best article in the market’: prostheses for women in nineteenth-century literature and commerce

Ryan Sweet

6Itinerant manipulators and public benefactors: artificial limb patents, medical professionalism and the moral economy in antebellum America

Caroline Lieffers

7Separating the surgical and commercial: space, prosthetics and the First World War

Julie Anderson

Select bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Figures

1.1Hearing trumpet with ‘F. C. Rein & Son. Patentees, Sole Inventors & Only Makers, 108 Strand London’ engraved around outer rim. Source: Thackray Medical Museum, Object No. 1333.003. Image: K. Sayer

1.2Arnold-branded hearing horn in gunmetal with accompanying bag. Source: Thackray Medical Museum collection, Object No. 2005. 0338. Image: K. Sayer

2.1A page from the 1917 edition of Fred Haslam & Co., Illustrated Catalogue of Surgical Instruments (Brooklyn, NY, Fred Haslam & Co., 1917), listing Toynbee’s artificial eardrum (top row, third from left) among other hearing instruments, indicating its classification as an acoustic aid. Image: Yale University, Cushing/Whitney Medical Library

3.1The front page of the 1936 Post Office advertisement booklet ‘A Telephone for Deaf Subscribers’. Image: BT Archives

3.2The Bristol engineers’ diagram of Harris’s amplifier. Image: BT Archives

3.3The front page of the 1938 Post Office advertisement booklet ‘Telephone service for the Deaf’. Image: BT Archives

4.1Woodcut of Derenzy’s Ivory Vice. George Webb Derenzy, Enchiridion, Or, A Hand for the One-Handed (London: T. and G. Underwood, 1822), 17. Image: New York Academy of Medicine Library

4.2Woodcut of Derenzy’s Hat-Stick. George Webb Derenzy, Enchiridion; or, A Hand for the One-Handed (London: T. and G. Underwood, 1822), 40. Image: New York Academy of Medicine Library

5.1An illustration of a male Marks-type artificial leg user digging with a shovel. George E. Marks, A Treatise on Marks’ Patent Artificial Limbs with Rubber Hands and Feet (New York, NY: A. A. Marks, 1888), 346. Available at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/loc.ark:/13960/t6h14501h?urlappend=%3Bseq=356 (accessed 6 May 2016). Courtesy of HathiTrust

5.2An illustration of a female Marks-type artificial-leg user demonstrating the mimetic capacities of her prosthesis. George E. Marks, A Treatise on Marks’ Patent Artificial Limbs with Rubber Hands and Feet (New York, NY: A. A. Marks, 1888), 335. Available at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/loc.ark:/13960/t6h14501h?urlappend=%3Bseq=345 (accessed 6 May 2016). Courtesy of HathiTrust

6.1Drawing from B. F. Palmer’s 1846 patent of his artificial leg, US Patent No. 4834. Image: United States Patent and Trademark Office

Tables

7.1Recommended costs for artificial-limb prostheses, 1915

Contributors

Julie Anderson is Reader in History at the University of Kent. She has published a number of articles on the intersection of the history of disability, mainly physical and sensory, and medicine, and she is the author of War, Disability and Rehabilitation: Soul of a Nation (2011). Her current work centres on histories of orthopaedics and ophthalmology, and her forthcoming book, The Science of Seeing: Vision and the Modern World in Britain, 1900–1950, will be published by Manchester University Press in 2017.

Laurel Daen is an adjunct lecturer of History at the College of William & Mary and the Lapidus Initiative Digital Communications Coordinator at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Her research focuses on the political, economic and cultural history of disability in early America. Her dissertation (William & Mary, 2016) explored the intertwined histories of disability and nation-building in the early American republic. Her work is forthcoming in the Journal of the Early Republic and Early American Literature.

Graeme Gooday is Professor of the History of Science and Technology at the University of Leeds. He has written on the socio-cultural history of British technology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on themes of trust, gender and ambivalence in Domesticating Electricity: Technology, Uncertainty and Gender, 1880–1914 (2008) and on the contentious history of patenting in early telecommunications and power in Patently Contestable: Electrical Technologies and Inventor Identities on Trial in Britain (2013); the latter volume, with Stathis Arapostathis, was awarded the Pickstone Prize by the British Society for History of Science in 2014. Gooday is currently supervising the AHRC collaborative Ph.D. project ‘Transforming Communications for the UK’s Hearing Loss Community’ with BT Archives and Action on Hearing Loss and is collaborating with Karen Sayer to complete Hard of Hearing: Managing the Experience of Auditory Loss in Britain, 1830–1950.

Claire L. Jones is Lecturer in the History of Medicine at the University of Kent and Deputy Director of the University’s Centre for the History of Medicine, Ethics and Medical Humanities. Her research centres on the cultural, economic and social history of medicine and health in Britain post-1750, with particular emphases on the relationship between medicine and commerce and the multiple ways in which this relationship affects professional social structures, consumption and material culture. She has published numerous articles on this topic, and her first monograph on the development of medical industry in Britain, The Medical Trade Catalogue in Britain, 1870–1914, was published in 2013.

Caroline Lieffers is a Ph.D. student in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University, where she focuses on the histories of disability, medical ethics and domestic life. Her research is supported by the Trudeau Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Government of Alberta and Yale University.

Coreen McGuire is a Ph.D. student in the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds. Her thesis is titled, ‘The deaf subscriber and the shaping of the British Post Office’s amplified telephones, 1911–1939’. This is part of a larger AHRC-funded project on communication with hearing loss and is a collaborative doctoral partnership with BT Archives. Coreen’s research focuses on technologies that were designed in the early twentieth century to help people with hearing loss. She has collaborated with the Thackray Medical Museum and the Legacies of War project and recently sat her Level 1 sign-language exam.

Karen Sayer is Professor of Social and Cultural History and a faculty member of the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies at Leeds Trinity University and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In 2012, she led the organisation of ‘Disability and the Victorians: Confronting Legacies’, an international conference in which Victorian and Disability Studies intersected, sponsored by the British Association for Victorian Studies, for the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies. She has delivered papers at seminars and at international conference panels on the Victorian experience of hearing loss, and, with Professor Graeme Gooday, is contracted with Palgrave for a Palgrave Pivot volume addressing the pre-NHS management and self-management of hearing loss.

Ryan Sweet completed an AHRC-funded medical humanities Ph.D. in the Department of English at the University of Exeter in 2016. His thesis explored representations of prosthetic body parts in literature and culture from 1832 to 1908. Ryan has research published in Victorian Review, and he is a contributor to the online reader Victorian Disability: Culture and Contexts, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (www.nineteenthcenturydisability.org). Now Occasional Teacher at the University of Exeter and Associate Lecturer at Bath Spa University, Ryan is also the Managing Editor of the international academic journal Literature & History, which is published biannually by Sage Publications.

Jaipreet Virdi is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of History at Brock University, Ontario, whose work intersects the history of medicine and disability studies. She is working on a project, ‘Objects of Disability’, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, investigating the material culture of disability in the Canadian experience. She is also working on her first book, Hearing Happiness: Fakes, Frauds and Fads in Deafness Cures.

Series editors’ foreword

You know a subject has achieved maturity when a book series is dedicated to it. In the case of disability, while it has coexisted with human beings for centuries, the study of disability’s history is still quite young.

In setting up this series, we chose to encourage multi-methodologic history rather than a purely traditional historical approach, as researchers in disability history come from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds. Equally, ‘disability’ history is a diverse topic that benefits from a variety of approaches in order to appreciate its multidimensional characteristics.

A test for the team of authors and editors who bring you this series is typical of most series, but disability also brings other consequential challenges. At this time, disability is highly contested as a social category in both developing and developed contexts. Inclusion, philosophy, money, education, visibility, sexuality, identity and exclusion are but a handful of the social categories in play. With this degree of politicisation, language is necessarily a cardinal focus.

In an effort to support the plurality of historical voices, the editors have elected to give fair rein to language. Language is historically contingent and can appear offensive to our contemporary sensitivities. The authors and editors believe that the use of terminology that accurately reflects the historical period of any book in the series will assist readers in their understanding of the history of disability in time and place.

Finally, disability offers the cultural, social and intellectual historian a new ‘take’ on the world we know. We see disability history as one of a few nascent fields with the potential to reposition our understanding of the flow of cultures, society, institutions, ideas and lived experience. Conceptualisations of ‘society’ since the early modern period have heavily stressed principles of autonomy, rationality and the subjectivity of the individual agent. Consequently we are frequently oblivious to the historical contingency of the present with respect to those elements. Disability disturbs those foundational features of ‘the modern’. Studying disability history helps us resituate our policies, our beliefs and our experiences.

Julie Anderson

Walton O. Schalick III

Acknowledgements

This volume arises out of an AHRC Research Network project ‘Rethinking Patent Cultures’, 2013–14, and a project conference on commerce, patents and disability held at Leeds City Museum in September 2014. The editor would like to thank Manchester University Press, the AHRC and Leeds City Museum for their assistance and support and the authors of the chapters in this volume for all of their valuable contributions to this collection.

INTRODUCTION: MODERN PROSTHESES IN ANGLO-AMERICAN COMMODITY CULTURES

Claire L. Jones

Commodification in contemporary perspective

The present-day relationship between disability, technology and commerce in the developed world is hugely intricate. While the medical-industrial complex develops ever more innovative forms of myoelectric limb prostheses, cochlear ear implants and other devices designed to alleviate physical impairment, market responses to these technologies and the views these responses embody are diverse. For some, prosthetic technologies have certainly transformed lives, particularly those who have experienced impairment resulting from accidents, illness, trauma or war.¹ Other prostheses users, however, remain increasingly frustrated over the affordability, the functionality and general restrictions to innovation as a result of growing corporate monopolies and call for more effective, cheaper and more easily available products enabled by greater state sponsorship, the greater separation of design from manufacturing and, perhaps most crucially of all, user-generated platforms for open-source designs.²

Yet, at the same time, it is well recognised that those who rely on prostheses to ‘fix’ their body and transform it to a state of ‘normalcy’ are not representative of all prosthetic technology users’ experiences. Scholars within the burgeoning academic fields of disability studies and disability history, along with many disability-rights activists, have highlighted and sought to correct the impact of the ‘medical model of disability’, a conception of disability as a bodily defect that modern medical science and engineering are well equipped to correct. Indeed, it may well be suggested that the user experiences just outlined are underscored by the presupposition of the medical model. Since the late twentieth-century growth of the modern disability-rights movements in both Great Britain and the United States, the rejection of prosthetic technologies – of cochlear ear implants among the Deaf community for example – has often signalled attempts at forging identities that are not related to the medical profession’s view of disability but rather to forms of community-building aimed at remedying the previous exclusion of impaired individuals from social, cultural, economic and political life.³ Concurrently, however, some who reject medical conceptions of disability may have an uncomfortable relationship with prostheses; they may use an assistive device to function where barriers to access still persist, on public-transport systems, for example, and in such situations, their prosthesis conceals the social marker of impairment, allowing them to pass as ‘able-bodied’. Other individuals subvert manufacturers’ intended use for the technology by using their prosthesis as a proud assertion of their non-‘normal’ body, as artist Claire Cunningham does with the incorporation of her crutches into performance work.⁴

These diverse lived experiences of prosthetic technologies today represented through different interpretive frameworks are intricately tied to the past and to the study of the past. As scholars of disability know all too well, what constituted ‘disabled’ and ‘abled’ and the ways in which these two categories were viewed and constructed depends on temporal, social, geographical, cultural and economic contexts. This historical fluidity is also true for the relationship between innovation and commercialisation and between supply and demand, but our knowledge of the ways in which the changing status of prostheses and their markets relate to varying conceptions of disability is limited. Indeed, the ‘new disability history’, spurred by disability-rights activism and patient-centred narratives, has recently taken the lived experience of disability as its focus in order ‘to join the social-constructionist insights and interdisciplinarity of cultural studies with solid empirical research’ and could be usefully supplemented by an exploration into how markets for prosthetic technologies shape those user experiences.⁵ Certainly, the general dearth in detailed market-focused histories of prostheses may be partly due to the fact that they initially appear to be at odds with the new disability history’s efforts to emphasise the shortcomings of the medical model. Yet, as the diversity of experiences outlined above indicates, to neglect prostheses, how they came to be commodities and responses to them is to recount an incomplete lived reality of some individuals. Studying the commodification of prostheses may garner insight into how the medical model evolved, achieved its influence, and was institutionally realised. Understanding the ways in which such forces helped to develop and entrench the medical model may thus indeed serve those who seek to now limit its influence.

It is the purpose of this collection to contribute new insights into the historical experiences of disability by uncovering more about the nineteenth- and twentieth-century foundations of modern prosthesis industries and their many complexities. While today’s high-tech myoelectric limb prostheses and cochlear ear implants clearly differ from the relatively low-tech artificial limbs and hearing trumpets of the nineteenth century, this collection outlines the remarkable similarities between the commercial processes involved in successfully getting these seemingly different products to market. Yet, by taking a commodification approach, this collection does not seek to privilege its significance over and above other interpretive frameworks, or to suggest that historians have neglected economic approaches to disability and prostheses altogether. Indeed, the collection is informed by materialist histories of disability, which have drawn on Marxist political economy in order highlight the importance of modern industrial capitalism in shaping disability and prosthesis use.⁶ Instead, its aim is to bring together a body of new scholarship from established historians and promising early careers researchers from a variety of historical sub-disciplines to consider in more depth the commodification processes surrounding prosthetics and the involvement of companies, users and others in these processes. In particular, a little-explored avenue in the history of disability, and of prostheses more specifically, is the significance of company investment in and their consideration of intellectual-property protection. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, just as today, patenting and copyright enhanced product commercial viability, and yet we know very little about their effect on prostheses markets.

In paying closer attention to commercial influences on prosthesis development and use, this volume not only outlines some of ways in which the expanding industries of prostheses and assistive devices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries formed a precursor to those we recognise today but also proposes commodification as another useful analytical tool for the historian interested in disability. While materialist histories of disabilities have been criticised for emphasising the socio-economic context of industrialisation over cultural factors and vice versa, the essays in this collection seek to align these elements through a culturally embedded history of the prosthesis as a commodity. As historian David M. Turner has recently argued, ‘an approach is required which simultaneously appreciates that disability is shaped by people’s particular social and cultural identities and their positions, while recognising that social and medical discourses, institutional practices and spatial environments also act to shape bodies and experiences’.⁷ By addressing the interrelation of these factors, a culturally informed commodification approach can inform ongoing efforts at reconceptualising disability.

Prosthesis commodification since the nineteenth century

As a descriptive term for an artificial body part, ‘prosthesis’ gained its modern meaning in the eighteenth century.⁸ While artificial body parts were certainly used prior to the eighteenth century, a growing body of scholarship has outlined how the rise of new pathological-anatomical understandings of the body in late eighteenth-century Western thought aligned with the beginnings of industrialisation that gave rise to the commercial production and promotion of new forms of prosthetic technologies.⁹ New understandings of the body, which provided a more clearly defined medical perspective of disability, resulted in the medical profession’s attempt to control the impaired body through new corrective procedures and was accompanied by a growing distaste for visible signs of physical impairment within ‘polite society’.¹⁰ In a new world oriented around the able-bodied, a prosthesis became a device crucial for those with physical or sensory impairment to participate in society. Replacement body parts such as artificial limbs were far from the only assistive devices available. As recent studies by Liliane Hilaire-Pérez and Christelle Rabier and by David Turner and Alun Withey have demonstrated, an increasing range of devices detached and detachable from the body, from rupture trusses, walking sticks and spectacles to elaborate machines, also become widely promoted from the late eighteenth century.¹¹ Like replacement body parts, these devices ‘fashioned’ the body to both restore functional capability and to create the aesthetic of ‘normalcy’.

Yet, while this array of devices was prominently promoted in the late eighteenth century, industrial structures and commercial markets for such products were relatively small and fragmented. It was from the nineteenth century, with the further advancement and alignment of medicine and modern industrial capitalism, that prosthetics flourished, in both scale of production and design innovation. Not only was the nineteenth century a moment of major redefinition in disability history, as various state-sanctioned institutions brought disabled people under professional supervision, but definite shifts in the economy occurred too.¹² As the UK established itself as the ‘the workshop of the world’, with the United States as its greatest English-speaking global economic rival following closely behind, the manufactured prosthetic tool was transformed into a standardised commodity that reached large numbers of commercially literate consumers across the world. New modes of production both excluded those with physical impairments and facilitated the manufacture of technologically more complex prostheses. Although it never became a mass-market good along the lines of a patent medicine, the prosthesis became a familiar piece of hardware that not only embodied economic value through market exchange but also standardised social and cultural meanings of disability as bodily impairments that required normalising.¹³ Prostheses were thus commodified as they circulated and as ownership of them transferred from buyer and producer to seller and user. Property relations of a different kind, in the form of intellectual property and patents, also became crucial from the nineteenth century as ownership of the individual body and rights over ‘correcting it’ became contested following revisions to patent laws.

Centring their analysis on prosthesis commodification and commercialisation, this collection of essays therefore takes a more inclusive view of prostheses, one that recognises devices external to the body, such as specialist cutlery (discussed in Chapter 4 by Laurel Daen), hearing trumpets (discussed in Chapter 1 by Graeme Gooday and Karen Sayer) and amplified telephones (discussed in Chapter 3 by Coreen McGuire), as well as the replacement body parts discussed by Jaipreet Virdi, Ryan Sweet, Caroline Lieffers and Julie Anderson. Accordingly, the collection provides us with a more holistic and thus more meaningful analysis of the technologies that users incorporated into their daily lives in order to ‘correct’ or hide their bodily difference. At its most extreme definition, prostheses may incorporate any device that intervenes on human subjectivity, such as computers, even to the extent that they have the power to transform humans into cyborgs.¹⁴ While it is important to note that this book does not adopt a Foucauldian perspective on technologies of self-fashioning, it does view assistive technology as a mere variation of traditional prosthetics because both assist, and have long assisted, with independent living and access to life- and work-related activities. The two terms are therefore used more or less interchangeably. However, this collection does incorporate one crucial tenet of post-modern critiques: prostheses are more than just hardware. Like other technologies, prostheses are and were ideological tools, and their widespread consumption is contingent on the economic, social and cultural contexts in which they are designed, produced and promoted.

By addressing several commodification processes simultaneously, each chapter highlights the complex intertwined relationships between them. Processes divided into neat divisions were