Museumsdinge und Körpergeschichte

Die Prothesen des Lehrers R.

Abstract

English abstract: This article considers how museum objects can be used as sources to reconstruct histories of the body. By focusing on two prostheses that had been used by a West German war invalid and are now kept in the collections of the Deutsches HygieneMuseum, it depicts how materiality and information on individual objects stimulate investigation and add to historicizing the body. It reconstructs how these prostheses were linked to ideas about the body, how they formed the body and which techniques of the body they prompted.