I think you had better not go to look at him. He's a dreadful object-the worst I've seen. They cut off his legs close to the trunk, his arms at the shoulders, the nose and ears. He was such a handsome fellow, too! But I tell you, sir, now he's nothing better than a human bundle-a lump of breathing, useless flesh.Ernest G. Henham, 'A Human Bundle' (1897). 1 Published in the metropolitan middle-class family magazine Temple Bar in 1897, Canadian-British author Ernest G. Henham's short story 'A Human Bundle' is a text that in hyperbolic terms perpetuates fears about physical 'loss'-anxieties central to nineteenth-century Western bodily discourse. 2 The quotation above, from a horrified medical student who has witnessed the shocking amputation of an unfortunate young man's legs, arms, nose, and ears suggests what the 'loss' of body parts meant in the nineteenth century. For the medical student, the patient is neither human nor useful but rather 'nothing better than a human bundle'. 3 The student's harsh assessment is partly justified by the egregious nature of the medical procedures undertaken, but such a response raises a series of questions about what constituted physical 'normalcy' and difference in this period, which historical factors underpinned negative attitudes to 'non-normative' bodies, and to what extent the apparent hegemony of physical 'wholeness' was complicated by literary representations.

In 1822, George Webb Derenzy, a former captain in the British army, published a volume titled Enchiridion: Or, A Hand for the One-Handed. The text highlighted what Derenzy called his ‘One-Handed Apparatus,’ a collection of twenty instruments that he had made after losing his arm in the Napoleonic Wars. Designed to ease his daily routines of washing, eating, writing, and socializing, Derenzy’s inventions included, among other items, an egg cup that tilted in any direction and a card-holder that fanned out and folded up for easy transportation. This chapter examines Derenzy’s motivations for publishing the Enchiridion; the responses he received from readers around the globe; and the presuppositions about gender and class that ultimately constrained his consumer appeal and profit. Derenzy chose to publish, not patent, his contraptions due to his charitable desires to share them with others with lost limbs. His focus on using his prostheses to reclaim aspects of his social respectability and manly independence that his impairments seemed to threaten, however, ended up alienating poor, middling, and female patrons and limiting his success as an entrepreneur and a philanthropist. Perhaps due to these marketing missteps, Derenzy experienced the plight of many physically-impaired people during the period; unable to profitably labour, he sustained a steady descent into poverty.

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