Featured on PDR in the collection A Treatise on Artificial Limbs (1899)

Published at the century’s turn, George Edwin Marks’ treatise on prosthesis sought total knowledge. Not merely a history of artificial limbs, it spans more than five hundred pages, containing eight hundred illustrations. “An effort has been made to parallel every possible case of amputation”, begins the Preface, so that “[a]ny person who is maimed in leg, arm, foot, or hand will be able to find a case almost identical with his own”. Due to the injuries incurred during the Napoleonic Wars and the U.S. Civil War — and subsequent cultural representations and (often perverse) public fascination regarding amputees in nineteenth-century literature and visual culture — this Treatise bookends a period of maximum need and increased visibility.