When Elizabeth Wright smacks her right leg on a table, she says “ow.” That’s only interesting if you know one more thing: that her right leg is made out of carbon fiber and metal. It’s also part of her. “It is my right leg, just as my left leg is my left leg, and just as your right leg is your right leg.”
Wright was born with something called congenital limb deficiency—neither her right arm or right leg grew to their full length in the womb. At 2 years old, she was fitted with a prosthetic leg, something she describes as “a revelation.” Around the time she was 6 years old the doctors decided it was time for her to try a prosthetic arm. That didn’t go as well. “This was in the 80s,” Wright says, “before the fancy hands you can use to pick up eggs and not break them. The arm that I got it was purely for aesthetic reasons, it just hung there like some kind of weird dead arm, and I couldn’t do anything with it. I could actually do less. So I think it lasted two or three days and then it got relegated to the cupboard. I refused to wear it.”
Aimee Mullins was one of the first amputees to really think about prosthetics as a question of enhancement rather than replacement. Mullins was born without fibula bones—one of the two bones that make up the lower leg. On her first birthday, doctors amputated both her legs below the knee. At 2 she was walking on prosthetics; at 17 she was off to Georgetown where she ran track and field, becoming the first amputee (male or female) to compete in the NCAA. It was there that she became the first person in the world to wear the now-iconic cheetah legs, and in 1996 she competed in the Paralympics on them.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: Blueprint for a Better Human Body
