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This chapter adds to historical studies of artificial body parts by exploring the reciprocal relationship between fictional texts and the prosthesis industry in nineteenth-century Britain and America. Focussing primarily on prostheses—including artificial legs, dentures, and glass eyes—in relation to female users, it demonstrates that fictional writing was a key component of nineteenth-century prosthesis discourse. The chapter argues that literary stories provided practical advice for readers on the kinds of prostheses that should be avoided for both social and functional purposes. Women in particular were targeted as consumers who should pay special attention when choosing prostheses. Popular literary sources, often packaged as marriage plots, provided kinds of advertisements not for but against certain prostheses. Meanwhile, both entire fictional works and particular representational strategies were used by contemporary prosthetists interchangeably as means through which to subtly disparage the devices of opposing makers, reinforce the proprietary ownership of particular designs, or promote the concealing abilities of particular devices to female users.

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Research on physical and intellectual incapacity in early America (defined in this essay as North America and the Caribbean before 1820) dates at least to the 1930s, but only in the past decade or so have historians focused on disability, spawning the burgeoning subfield of early American disability history. Inspired by disability rights activism and the discipline of disability studies, scholars in the field approach disability as a historically variable and ever‐nuanced category akin to gender, race, and class. Departing from earlier scholarship that viewed impairment as a health condition best resolved by social welfare and medicine, recent works meld analysis of the concept of disability and its influence on structures of power with a commitment to recovering the lives and experiences of impaired people. This essay examines two areas of new research in the field of early American disability history: (a) disability in law and government and (b) disability and slavery. The essay also discusses recent works that have pushed the theoretical bounds of the field, using analytical strategies that blend past and present, foreground language, and question the concept of disability itself.