Kimberly Cox, Review of Clare Stainthorp’s “Activity and Passivity: Class and Gender in the Case of the Artificial Hand.”

摘要

Clare Stainthorp’s article makes evident that Henry Robert Heather Bigg’s ArtificialLimbs and the Amputations which Afford the Most Appropriate Stumps in Civil andMilitary Surgery (1885) is a must read for those of us studying Victorian disability,hands, or material culture. Her analysis of a woman’s prosthetic hand as described byBigg—the surgeon who created it—reveals how the medical community’s views on thefunction of prosthetics were shaped by, as well as actively shaping, societal perceptionsof gender, class, and physical norms, especially for upper-class women of marriageableage. While the article focuses on one specific case of prosthesis, it does so to argue thatstudies on disability in the nineteenth century need to account for and analyze “thedistinctive voice of nineteenth-century medical professionals” to fully account forpredominant views on normativity and wholeness, and further how those views extendto questions of class and gender (14).