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| A prosthetic leg made for Henry Paget, via Age of Revolution |
C/W: Contains description of surgery and amputation.
The story of prosthetics is one of human ingenuity. Based on the existing evidence the earliest entry in this story is of an individual who would eventually be buried near the ancient city of Thebes some time between 950 and 710 BC. This individual at some point found themselves in need of a replacement big toe, and a prosthetic was made. Their mummified remains, complete with their prosthetic toe, were discovered in AD 2000, and ten years later a team of biomechanical engineers would discover that the design of the prosthetic was such that it did not require the individual to wear any kind of specialist shoe to hold it in place - they could walk barefoot or in normal Egyptian sandals. The previous earliest prosthetic we have (or rather had) physical evidence for dated from 300 BC - known as the Capua leg, named for the site of its discovery - it was held by the Royal College of Surgeons, but was destroyed during an air raid in World War 2. The era between 1480 and 1570 gives us the prosthetic hand of Gottfried of Berlichingen - whose prosthetic hand became folded into his common name - 'Gotz of the Iron Hand'.
As with the vast majority of equipment used by people of the era, including mobility equipment, most were one of a kind pieces with considerable variation on common design. It is likely that the occurrence of similar designs in multiple places was owing to separate craftspeople independently arriving at the same solutions rather than any type of standardization. Indeed, with some equipment such as crutches, medieval designs and modern ones can be very similar. While prosthetics appear in the written record after as far back as our Theban example, and appear in images from the Middle Ages, there is little evidence for any kind of common manual for producing such items - since it fell under crafts taught by apprenticeship rather than through the formal education system of learned medicine of the time. The dates of some developments are a matter of debate. An article from 1989 exploring the history of prosthetics explores Gotz's iron hand in detail, and notes the contribution of the physician Ambrose Pare. However the claim that Pare was the first to develop a kneeling prosthetic leg is questionable given that images of very similar designs dating from almost a hundred years before Pare's birth. Over time hinged prosthetics were developed, but designs remains similar through the medieval period to the 1800s. Throughout the period and into the 1800s the two of the main driving forces behind both the need for prosthetics and their development were industrial accidents - which would only increase with more and more fast moving machinery - and war. It is perhaps the later which contributed to greater refinement in the 1800s, as a greater number of officers - many from wealthy families who could afford to fund innovation - began to need replacements for limbs which has been lost in battle. And so we come to the story Anglesey Leg.
