Ecce Homo Prostheticus

In 1919 the editors of a German medical text on orthopedics allowed a glint of dark humor to sneak into an otherwise sober scientific publication. The book, published by Germany's foremost testing center for artificial limbs, is a comprehensive volume of essays on the latest developments in prosthetic technology, entitled Artificial Limbs and Work Aids for War Cripples and Accident Victims.1 It is profusely illustrated with photographs depicting new surgical procedures (such as Ferdinand Sauerbruch's painstaking method of reconstructing the musculature of a stump), the latest designs in lightweight metal prosthetic limbs, and the practical application and manipulation of these devices, dispassionately demonstrated by recent amputees. Page after page, the mutilated bodies of the human models appear all the more fragile and pliable next to the machine-like hardness and precision of their state-of-the-art prosthetic attachments. Two small photographs inconspicuously buried among the technical diagrams, however, give the therapeutic fusion of flesh and metal a strange new twist. The model here is a classical statue, a modem plaster confection with a tilted Praxitelean head, missing both arms and one leg, his genitals discreetly covered by a fig leaf. In place of the missing right leg, the figure is equipped with a temporary metal prosthesis attached to the bandaged plaster stump, leather straps around the waist and shoulder.