By Heidi Hausse & Peden Jones/The Conversation To think about an artificial limb is to think about a person. It’s an object of touch and motion made to be used, one that attaches to the body and interacts with its user’s world. Historical artifacts of prosthetic limbs are far removed from this lived context. Their users are gone. They are damaged – deteriorated by time and exposure to the elements. They are motionless, kept on display or in museum storage. Yet, such artifacts are rare direct sources into the lives of historical amputees. We focus on the tools amputees used in 16th- and 17th-century Europe. There are few records written from amputees’ perspectives at that time, and those that exist
