The Malleable Body: Surgeons, Artisans, and Amputees in Early Modern Germany (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781526190833)

WINNER of the 2025 European Association for the History of Medicine and Health Book Award

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.

Author: Heidi Hausse
ISBN-10: 1526190834
ISBN-13: 9781526190833
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Language: English
Published: 06/03/2025
Pages: 288
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.60d