Recent years have brought concerted efforts to move disabled bodies and minds from the fringes of discourse on the so-called ‘classical body’ to a position closer to the centre. This has included monographs synthesising evidence for a range of disabilities and impairments across ancient Greek and/or Roman contexts, and individual articles and chapters addressing one specific source, context, form of disability/impairment or disciplinary position (e.g. medicine, bioarchaeology). Jane Draycott's latest study positions itself between these two. As a monograph dedicated to investigating a single topic — ‘prostheses, prosthesis use, and prostheses users’ (7) — it represents significant progression within this area, offering a rare book-length study of a specific response to a restricted range of potentially disabling conditions. Accordingly, D. argues that prostheses can ‘give us an insight into ancient cultures and societies and their users’ places within those, in addition to telling us something about the individuals themselves’ (27). She presents new interpretations of prostheses as ‘technologies of participation’ that allowed those who wore or used them to ‘participate more fully in society’ and as extensions of the body that were simultaneously ‘extensions of the self’ (173). D.'s narrowed focus notwithstanding, her meticulous marshalling of evidence from literary, documentary, archaeological and bioarchaeological sources spanning all regions of the ancient Mediterranean (including Egypt), and from Greek mythology to the Talmud and early Medieval texts, means that the project still essentially pursues a synthetic approach and sidelines the implications of chronological, geographical, cultural and religious distinctions. Nevertheless, the book will undoubtedly prompt further examination of these nuances by others.
The book is structured by types of prostheses and the likely reasons for their use. After an Introduction, ch. 1 reviews the unexpectedly sparse evidence for extremity prostheses compared with plentiful accounts of limb loss, and the implications for other assistive technologies such as canes and crutches. Ch. 2 turns to facial features including teeth and their social and cultural significance for ‘prestige, wealth, status, gender, and sexuality’ (100). In ch. 3 the reader learns that hair is the best-attested type of prosthesis, and that among the Roman elite hair loss was more socially disabling than other impairments. Ch. 4 explores the restricted evidence for how prostheses were designed, commissioned and manufactured, reinforcing D.'s argument that this was an individual's personal responsibility and explaining the variety of forms identified archaeologically. In ch. 5 ‘living’ prostheses, including free, freed and enslaved people (and possibly animals), are considered, with D. arguing that these may have negated the need for so-called ‘functional’ prostheses. A Conclusion sums up the key points, recommending that in certain circumstances prostheses be viewed less as functional items and more as dress, connected with how a person presented themselves to the world.
In the lengthy Introduction, D. reviews prosthesis forms, use and the experiences of their users in the early twenty-first century, asking questions about how far the function of prostheses extends to expressions of personal identity. Here D. successfully highlights the tensions involved in examining items which straddle multiple categories: functional and aesthetic; practical and impractical; object and person. She also presents a modern definition of a prosthesis that she extends broadly to antiquity: ‘a device that replaces a missing body part, usually (but, crucially, as we shall see, not always) designed and assembled according to the individual's appearance and functional needs, and usually (but, again, crucially, not always) as unobtrusive and as useful as possible so as to maximise the chances of their acceptance of it’ (10). This definition leans heavily on medical models that frame disability as a problem to be fixed and is reinforced by D.'s subsequent analysis of the reasons behind the ‘loss’ of limbs or facial features, and responses to those losses through the adoption of prostheses ‘as a true substitute or replacement for the individual's missing body part’ (72, 101, 123). D. explains how wearing a prosthesis was not in and of itself socially disabling, and in many cases nor were the impairments that led to their use. However, the emphasis on loss in those sections that explore how a person might come to ‘require’ a prosthesis runs the risk of presenting prostheses and their users via a deficit model of disability in which individuals are characterised as deviating from an unstated sense of somatic ‘normality’ or completeness. The book is not framed explicitly as a contribution to disability studies, but this is certainly one context in which it will be read, and some readers will find this perspective problematic.
The book's Introduction also presents in table form the data D. has collected, including prosthesis types, frequency within mythological or historical accounts, user's gender and materials used, as well as quantifying the archaeological and bioarchaeological evidence. These tables provide an immensely valuable repository of source material that will prompt further investigations. Simultaneously, they reveal how restricted the evidence is. Although D. notes 107 literary references, their effectiveness for addressing her key questions is betrayed by regular repetition of the same examples within and across chapters (often word for word). Although this means each chapter can be read in isolation — particularly beneficial for use in teaching — the cover-to-cover reader absorbing the overall argument may find themselves questioning the depth of the evidence underpinning the project. Nevertheless, D. maximises her dataset to expose for the first time the complexities of ancient prostheses and their users, while stimulating valuable new questions about body/object relations.
