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

• Published in: Victorian Studies Vol. 61; no. 1; pp. 130 - 132
• Main Author: Prizel, Natalie
• Format: Book Review Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bloomington Indiana University Press 22.09.2018
• Subjects: 19th century; Collins, Wilkie (1824-1889); Commodification; Commodities; Consumption; Cultural identity; Deafness; Dialectics; Dickens, Charles (1812-1870); Disability studies; Essays; Ethics; Inventors; Medicine; Nonfiction; Physicians; Post offices; Prostheses; Prosthetic devices; Science history; Telephones; Victorian period; Working class
• ISSN: 0042-5222; 1527-2052
• DOI: 10.2979/victorianstudies.61.1.17

[...]to combine that approach with a "commodification approach" to discuss the uneasy intersections among medicine, technology, patent law, and prostheses in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brings the attendant risk of turning disabled subjects into mere consumers rather than a minoritized identity group (3). Attending to the writings of working-class disabled subjects as well as the streetworkers in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1851; 1861-62) as informal "user-inventors," for example, might have allowed the volume to broaden its scope in terms of both class and varieties of market economies (18). Coreen McGuire's fascinating essay on the relationship between the Post Office and user-inventors in the invention of amplified telephony demonstrates the ways in which disability and technology become mutually constitutive: "the amplified telephone was used by the Post Office to categorise their users' identity as either hearing (could use the standard telephone model), hard-of-hearing (could use the telephone when amplified) or deaf (could not use the telephone even when amplified)" (84). Breaking with an item in the American Medical Association's 1847 ethical code in which it was "derogatory to professional character . . . for a physician to hold a patent for any surgical instrument, or medicine," Palmer used his patent to distinguish what he believed to be a superior product from inferior ones for the benefit of the patient (137, ellipses in original).