The Orthotic and Prosthetic Assistance Fund (OPAF) offers the following press release in cooperation with University of Chicago Press
(http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/16224.ctl) as a public service announcement (PSA) that helps to fulfill OPAF’s official representation of O&P in community and philanthropic circles. OPAF aims primarily to enable individuals with physical disabilities – especially those served by members of the U.S. orthotics and prosthetics community
– to enjoy the rewards of personal achievement, physical fitness, and social interaction. Complete information about OPAF is available at http://www.opfund.org.
David Serlin’s book Replaceable You will be of particular interest to members of the O&P community who, like OPAF, are engaged in promoting greater public awareness of the past, present, and future of O&P.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Replaceable You
Engineering the Body in Postwar America
by David Serlin
University of Chicago Press – $25.00 (pbk)
0-226-74884-7
1952. A handsome amputee and veteran of World War II holds a book of matches with his new prosthetic hand and lights a cigarette with the other while a photographer captures the image for posterity. Meanwhile, a group of physically disfigured young women-survivors of Hiroshima-dream of how American plastic surgeons will repair their bodies and their futures. Half a world away, a young man from the Bronx recuperates in a hospital bed after having been transformed into a beautiful woman.
During the postwar era the U.S. underwent a massive cultural transformation that was vividly realized in the development and widespread use of new medical technologies. Plastic surgery, wonder drugs, artificial organs, and scientific triumphs such as the Salk polio vaccine inspired Americans to believe in a new age of modern medical miracles. The nationalistic pride that flourished in postwar society, meanwhile, also encouraged many Americans to put tremendous faith in the power of medicine to rehabilitate and otherwise transform the lives and bodies of the disabled and those considered abnormal.
Replaceable You revisits this era in history to consider how these medical technologies and procedures were used to advance the politics of conformity during the 1950s. David Serlin shows how the use of these unprecedented developments in medicine came to reflect and reaffirm Cold War anxieties about normalcy, patriotism, and consensus. Innovations in prosthetics, endocrinology, reconstructive surgery, and sex reassignment techniques, he reveals, were promoted as tools of physical and political consent.
A work of remarkable virtuosity, Replaceable You is a nuanced history that views medical innovations through the revealing lens of mid-twentieth-century American culture.
David Serlin is a historian, writer, educator, and the coeditor of Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics. He is also available for interviews. For more information, please contact Mark Heineke at 773-702-7897 or [email protected]
