Andrew Lustig
Professor Mallard
ECE 101
24 October 2012
Can Anybody Lend A Hand? Prosthetic limbs all started with a very simple problem. Do you just give up hope when you lose an arm or a leg, or is there some other way to make the best of a situation? Hope was not given up by us persistent human beings and that is how artificial limbs were thought of. Instead trying to get around, we thought of artificial legs to help those who have lost them. Instead of only having one arm, we thought of artificial arms to be able to have two again. Prosthesis not only brought hope to those who were seriously injured and lost their limbs, but it helped these people bring their lives back to as normal as it could be. Of course prosthesis did not …show more content…

World War I also didn’t create much advancement in artificial limbs because of low casualties and the depression. “After World War II , prosthetic research developed the beginnings of the prostheses in widespread use today” (Spaeth vii), in what was called the Artificial Limb Program. They even further developed artificial limbs by making things such as;
“the patellar-tendon-bearing (PTB) below-knee prosthesis, the quadrilateral socket and accompanying method of alignment, the Henschke-Mauch hydraulic knee unit, a totally new armamentarium for management of upper limb amputees, and the amputee clinic team of concept. Of tremendous significance was the emphasis on early fitting and saving the knee when amputation was necessary due to arteriosclerosis”(6).
All of these progressions were very important in changing prosthetics from a simple peg leg to the types of artificial limbs present today. If it weren’t for these, we wouldn’t be nearly as advanced in the field or prosthetics and would be far behind. From here many organizations were made in order to support amputees. Also because the profession of being a prosthetist was only taught by experienced prosthetists and there was no other way of learning available, the University of California started offering classes in around the 1950’s. With classes now available about