Historical Background

The Kassel Hand

The “Kassel Hand” is an artifact of a prosthetic hand (Inv. Nr. KP B XIV. 32, Sammlung Angewandte Kunst) in the collections of Hessen Kassel Heritage (formerly Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel). You can find it on display in a military-history exhibit at the Museum Schloss Friedrichstein in Bad Wildungen, Germany. It is dated to the sixteenth century, but the earliest reference to it in museum records appears in 1874  and does not give any details about its original acquisition. The identities of who wore it and who made it are a mystery.

But here is what we do know: it is a prosthetic right hand made of wrought iron from the sixteenth century. All four of its fingers move individually at the joint where they meet the hand (the metacarpophalangeal joints) and can be locked separately into approximately seven different fixed positions through internal spring-driven mechanisms. The thumb was designed to do the same, but it’s currently broken. The base of each finger ends in a ratchet, or toothed wheel, that catches internally on short pawls held at tension by springs.

At the base of the wrist is a release switch, used to free the fingers from a locked position. While buttons are the more common form of user interface found on prosthetic artifacts like the Kassel Hand, in this object the release uniquely takes the form of a “trigger” that juts out of the wrist and is operated by pulling it rather than pressing it. A wearer would have operated the artificial hand by pressing down on the fingers from the outside—perhaps using an intact other hand to do this, or by maneuvering the prosthesis to press the artificial fingers against a surface (one’s body, a piece of furniture, a wall, etc.).

 The Kassel Hand has an exterior of overlapping wrought iron sheets. Their smooth surface is not a solid color, which could mean the iron is partially discolored, a protective resin is peeling, or that it was once painted. There are examples of other iron hands from this period painted in skin tones of beige and tan. The Kassel Hand was meant to appear like a hand rather than, say, a piece of armor. A telling clue is that it has engraved fingernails at the tips of the fingers.

Given its metal material, one might assume that it’s quite heavy. In actuality, it weighs a little more than a pound (626.3 grams). The iron casing that makes up the outer “shell” of the hand is hollow, with the internal mechanisms that lock and release the barrel-shaped fingers fitted inside. The wearer likely fastened the prosthesis to the forearm using the two iron rings at the shell’s wrist, one of which has broken off.

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Mechanical Hands in Early Modern Europe (c.1500-1700)

The Kassel Hand is one of approximately thirty surviving artifacts of mechanical hands from sixteenth-and-seventeenth-century Europe. Mechanical hands were a new kind of prosthetic technology that first appeared in the late fifteenth century.¹ They were the product of a certain cultural and technological moment.

Written sources reveal little about the experiences of most who survived limb amputation. Survival rates may have been as low as 25%.² But among those who made it through, artifacts show improvisation was key to how they navigated their environments. This reflected a world in which prosthetics were not yet “medical.” In the U.S. today, a doctor’s prescription is necessary for an artificial limb. Early modern surgeons sometimes provided small devices like artificial noses, but they didn’t design, make or fit prosthetic limbs.³ Furthermore, there was no occupation comparable to today’s prosthetists, or health care professionals who make and fit prostheses. Instead, early modern amputees used their own resources and ingenuity to have ones made.⁴ Collaboration between amputees and artisans was the driving force behind their development.

Mechanical hands were improvised creations produced as custom orders in a thriving craft market. They could be made of iron, brass, or wood and include leather straps or textiles such as linen. With no single craft group dedicated to making them, these prostheses reflect the work of several different kinds of highly skilled master artisans, including locksmiths, clockmakers, armorers, gunsmiths, blacksmiths, and woodworkers.⁵

As seen in the Kassel Hand, the movable fingers of these prostheses locked into different positions through internal spring-driven mechanisms. They had lifelike details: engraved fingernails, wrinkles and even flesh-toned paint. In some mechanical hands the fingers move together, while in others they move individually. The most sophisticated are flexible in every joint of every finger.

This technology drew from surprising places, including locks, clocks and luxury handguns. In a world without today’s standardized models, early modern amputees commissioned prostheses from scratch by venturing into the craft market. As one sixteenth-century contract between an amputee and a Genevan clockmaker attests, buyers dropped into the shops of artisans who’d never made a prosthesis to see what they could concoct.⁶

Because these materials were often expensive, wearers tended to be wealthy. In fact, the introduction of mechanical hands marks the first time period when European scholars can readily distinguish between people of different social classes based on their prostheses.⁷

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Interpretations of Mechanical Hands

There are more surviving artifacts of mechanical hands than there are textual references to them in historical sources. Yet, textual sources have dominated historians’ traditional interpretations, which have only been revised in recent years.

Debunked: The surgeon Ambroise Paré “invented” mechanical limbs

The first traditional interpretation is a “great man” myth from the history of medicine, which can still be found in popular textbooks. According to this tradition, the surgeon Ambroise Paré invented mechanical limbs in his sixteenth-century treatise on artificial body parts. As the earliest artifact predates this treatise, and the treatise presents the designs of a Parisian locksmith, that myth has been debunked.⁸

Challenged: Mechanical hands belonged only to knights

The second traditional interpretation considers mechanical hands solely as the possessions of wounded knights who used them to hold the reins of their horses and even to wield swords when they returned to battle. Here the threads of a “warrior” myth must be disentangled from the written record. Autobiography and biography, verse chronicle, and occasional archival sources refer to “iron hands” in the context of an injured male combatant losing a hand and acquiring an artificial one. However, since the late eighteenth century, this martial association became entwined with the heroicized image of the sixteenth-century German knight Götz von Berlichingen.⁹

Götz supposedly wore a famous and technologically complex hand prosthesis known in German as the “Zweithand”—literally the “second hand”—on display in the Berlichingen family seat of Jagsthausen, Germany, today. In 1773, the playwright Goethe drew loosely from Götz’s life for a drama about a charismatic and fearless knight who dies tragically, wounded and imprisoned, while exclaiming “Freedom – freedom!”.¹⁰ (The historical Götz died of old age). Götz’s story has inspired visions of a bionic warrior ever since. Whether in the 18^th century or the 21^st, you can find mythical depictions of Götz standing defiant in the face of authority and clutching a sword in his iron hand. Until recently, scholars supposed all iron hands must have belonged to knights like Götz.

The Kassel Hand Project is part of historical research that disentangles the historical record from glamorized myths to get closer to the experiences of amputees from five hundred years ago. Written sources support the idea that riders could use iron hands to hold reins but say nothing about wielding weapons¹¹–and examinations of artifacts strongly suggests holding weapons in battle would be an impractical feat for these devices. The written record neither suggests that iron hands’ sole function was for battle, nor does it exclude the possibility that amputees other than knights wore them.

Looking at the artifacts, it is clear their wearers and makers had more in mind for them than an exclusively military function. Most obvious is their form: they are shaped like natural hands with fingernails and skin wrinkles and flesh-toned paint, they are made of expensive materials, and their mechanisms are complex and delicate.

Moreover, their mechanical movement offers more range and possibilities than what is needed to hold the reins of a horse. In fact, had a knight wanted only to hold his reins securely during battle, he could simply have adapted a locking gauntlet, which would have provided a sturdier, more reliable, and overall simpler solution. Locking gauntlets were steel mittens designed to secure the hand of a combatant into an “O” shape around a weapon using a hook and eye-peg, date to the same era as many mechanical hand artifacts.¹² The design of locking gauntlets was so effective that it was purportedly banned from some tournaments and has been referred to as the “forbidden gauntlet.”

Mechanical hands, however, with paint and engraved fingernails, and complex internal mechanisms, were clearly meant to do more than a locking gauntlet. In other words, the traditional martial interpretation is too narrow to be the only interpretation of these artifacts.

New Theory: Mechanical hands were designed primarily for display

In the Kassel Hand Project, we expanded our considerations of possible wearers to a wider spectrum of men and women from the well-to-do middling and upper classes. We made room for the possibility that amputees commissioned mechanical hands to send powerful messages about self-sufficiency, status, power, virtue, and intelligence.¹³ This offers a performative interpretation of mechanical hands that situates them within fashionable trends among the elite for clever objects that blurred the boundaries of art and nature. It views these objects as tools of agency.

So, what did an amputee do with a mechanical hand? With traditional interpretations debunked or challenged, our experiments with the Kassel Hand considered a wide range of activities that male and female social elites from the German-speaking lands—from wealthy merchants to landed nobility—may have done. This included holding the reins of horses, but also tested out many other kinds of tasks, including picking up a drinking vessel, carrying a candlestick, lifting a chest lid, moving a small box, and tying a short lace.

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Amputation in Early Modern Europe

Mechanical hands appeared around the same time as another momentous change that took place in practices surrounding limb loss: debates about amputation techniques. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, surgeons went from hesitating to perform amputations in 1500 to debating multiple amputation methods by 1700.

Amputation was seen as a last resort because of the high risk of death. But some early modern surgeons started to believe they could use it along with artificial limbs to shape the body. They passionately debated where and how to cut the body to remove fingers, toes, arms and legs in ways medieval surgeons hadn’t.¹⁴ This was partly because they confronted two new developments in the Renaissance: the spread of gunpowder warfare and the printing press.

Surgery was a craft learned through apprenticeship and years of traveling to train under different masters. Topical ointments and minor procedures like setting broken bones, lancing boils and stitching wounds filled surgeons’ day-to-day practice.¹⁵ Because of their danger, major operations like amputations or trepanations – drilling a hole in the skull – were rare.¹⁶

Widespread use of firearms and artillery strained traditional surgical practices by tearing bodies apart in ways that required immediate amputation. These weapons also created wounds susceptible to infection and gangrene by crushing tissue, disrupting blood flow and introducing debris — ranging from wood splinters and metal fragments to scraps of clothing — deep into the body.¹⁷ Mangled and gangrenous limbs forced surgeons to choose between performing invasive surgeries or letting their patients die.

The printing press gave surgeons grappling with these injuries a means to spread their ideas and techniques beyond the battlefield. The procedures they described in their treatises can sound gruesome, particularly because they operated without anesthetics, antibiotics, transfusions or standardized sterilization techniques.

But each method had an underlying rationale. Striking off a hand with a mallet and chisel made the amputation quick. Cutting through desensitized, dead flesh and burning away the remaining dead matter with a cautery iron prevented patients from bleeding to death.¹⁸

While some wanted to save as much of the healthy body as possible, others insisted it was more important to reshape limbs so patients could use prostheses. Never before had European surgeons advocated amputation methods based on the placement and use of artificial limbs. Those who did so were coming to see the body not as something the surgeon should simply preserve, but rather as something the surgeon could mold.

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Amputees in Early Modern Europe

What was life like for an early modern amputee?

Answering that question is difficult. We have little direct evidence of amputees reflecting on their experiences. Those we do have—in autobiographies, for example—tend to minimize injury and do not address how limb loss affected day-to-day life. The German knight Götz von Berlichingen’s account of the injury and amputation of his right hand in 1504, for example, described his pain and despair in the immediate aftermath of his injury. But he finished his discussion of the event by declaring that he went on to war and feud “with one fist.”¹⁹  The remainder of the autobiography only mentions the missing hand in an aside.²⁰  Götz, dictating to a scribe decades after the event, framed the amputation as a triumph of his faith in God, but said little about the role it played in his everyday life in the many years that followed. 

Amputees appear in different kinds of institutional records, including charitable organizations like hospitals. (In the early modern period, caring for the sick was only one aspect of the charitable work of hospitals.) For example, the historical records of one hospital in Memmingen, Germany, includes receipts for the manufacture of wooden legs or repair work on wooden legs.²¹

Popular stereotypes in literature, art, and popular culture portrayed amputees and prostheses as symbols of poverty and misery.  Visual and literary sources alike frequently depicted beggars with wooden legs and crutches, using these as stylized signs of weakness, helplessness, and need worthy of public aid or medical care.²² For instance, in the wake of the Thirty Years’ War, soldiers with missing limbs appeared in widely circulated broadsheets to evoke defeat, wretchedness, and moral decay.²³ Historians have questioned whether negative representations like this reflected the reality of lived experience at the time.

There is some evidence offered by outside observers of how amputees transitioned to life with an altered body shape. For example, Matthaus Purmann, the barber-surgeon of Halberstadt, described a case in 1687 in which the right arm of a miller’s assistant was crushed in a workplace accident and surgically removed. Afterward the man learned to write and paint “beautifully” with his left hand. According to Purmann, he married, had children, and lived in Saxony in “prosperity.”²⁴

Surviving artifacts of prostheses—like mechanical hands—are rare direct sources of amputees’ experiences. Finding new ways to learn from these sources was a major goal of the Kassel Hand Project, which uses one artifact as a case study to investigate a historical amputee’s everyday lived world.

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References

1. Heidi Hausse, The Malleable Body: Surgeons, Artisans, and Amputees in Early Modern Germany (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023), 155-209. ↩︎
2. Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, 2^nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2010), 266. ↩︎
3. Heidi Hausse, “The Locksmith, the Surgeon, and the Mechanical Hand: Communicating Technical Knowledge in Early Modern Europe,” Technology and Culture 60:1 (2019): 34-64. ↩︎
4. Mareike Heide, Holzbein und Eisenhand: Prothesen in der Frühen Neuzeit (New York: Campus Verlag, 2019), 341. ↩︎
5. Hausse, Malleable Body, 155-209. ↩︎
6. Anthony Babel, Histoire corporative de l’horlogerie et des industries annexes (Geneva: A. Julien, 1916), 49-50; Lucien Descaves, “Correspondance medico-littéraire: Réponses,” La Chronique Médicale: revue mensuelle de médecine historique, littéraire & anecdotique 31 (March 1924): 88. ↩︎
7. Simone Kahlow, “Prothesen im Mittelalter–ein Überblick aus archäologischer Sicht,” in Homo debilis. Behinderte–Kranke–Versehrte in der Gesellschaft des Mittelalters, ed. Cordula Nolte (Korb: Didymos-Verlag, 2009), 220. ↩︎
8. Hausse, “The Locksmith, the Surgeon, and the Mechanical Hand.” ↩︎
9. Hausse, Malleable Body, 162-167. ↩︎
10. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goetz von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand. A Drama in Five Acts from the German of Goethe (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1837), 185. ↩︎
11. E.g., Moyse Amirault, La Vie de François, seigneur de La Noue… (Leiden, 1661), 63. ↩︎
12. Jakob Topf, An Almain Armourer’s Album: Selections from an Original MS. in Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, edited by Harold Arthur Lee-Dillon (London: W. Griggs, 1905), 2-3; Plate IV; Plate XVIII; Stephen V. Grancsay, “A Hapsburg Locking Gauntlet,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 32, no. 8 (Aug. 1937): 188-191; Helmut Nickel, “Arms and Armor,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 31, no. 4 (1973/1974): 58. ↩︎
13. Hausse, Malleable Body, 199-201. ↩︎
14. Hausse, Malleable Body, 82-118. ↩︎
15. Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe. ↩︎
16. Heidi Hausse, “Bones and Contention: The Decision to Amputate in Early Modern Germany,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 47:2 (2016): 327-350. ↩︎
17. John R. Kirkup, The History of Limb Amputation (London: Springer, 2007), 105. ↩︎
18. Hausse, Malleable Body, 82-118. ↩︎
19. Götz von Berlichingen, Mein Fehd und Handlungen, ed. Helgard Ulmschneider (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1981), 77: “mit einer faust.” ↩︎
20. See Bianca Frohne’s excellent textual analysis: “Performing Dis/ability? Constructions of ‘Infirmity’ in Late Medieval and Early Modern Life Writing,” in Infirmity in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Social and Cultural Approaches to Health, Weakness and Care, ed. Christian Krötzl et al. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 59-61. ↩︎
21. Heide, Holzbein und Eisenhand, 112. ↩︎
22. Heide, Holabein und Eisenhand, 278. Heide notes that institutional sources indicating recipients of public and private welfare do not support this early modern cultural stereotype and discusses other cultural meanings wooden legs could signify: Heide, 298, 279-81, 286. For a complex example in popular literature: Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Der seltzame Springinsfeld (Paphlagonia, 1670). ↩︎
23. E.g., Wolfgang Harms et al., Deutsche Illustrierte Flugblätter des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts. Die Sammlung der Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel (Munich: Kraus International Publications, 1980-1989), 2: 418-419, 486-487, 490-493. ↩︎
24. Matthäus Gottfried Purmann, Curiose Chirurgische Observationes… (Leipzig, 1710), 327. ↩︎