| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics. Ed. by Katherine Ott, David Serlin, and Stephen Mihm. (New York: New York University Press, 2002. vi, 359 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 0-8147-6197-6. Paper, $20.00, ISBN 0-8147-6198-4.)

"Prosthetics" has recently become a popular word in a metaphorical sense, as a literary device for dealing with body relationships in a complex, postmodern world. There has been relatively little written to date, however, about the more literal, concrete history of prosthetics, about the "material and social tales of prosthetics," which the authors take here to mean "external appliances used either to restore function or for physiological cosmetic effect" (pp. 3, 33). This collection of essays introduces readers to the potentially wide-ranging importance of such histories. It opens with an insightful essay by Katherine Ott, "The Sum of Its Parts: An Introduction to Modern Histories of Prosthetics," which serves as an excellent introduction to the entire field and as a prologue for the twelve chapters that follow. Those chapters are organized into three sections, roughly following the sequential experience of a specific prosthetic device: from the need for the device to its design and then to its eventual use in everyday life.

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