Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) was a physician and poet, famous for his ‘Breakfast-Table’ sketches. He was an ardent supporter of the Union cause and his son Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. saw extensive military service in the war, which is recorded in Mark De Wolfe Howe, ed., Touched with Fire: Civil War Letters and Diary of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 1861–1864 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947). The elder Holmes became personally involved in the war when he received the following telegram about his son: ‘Capt H wounded shot through the neck thought not mortal at Keedysville.’ He later recorded his reactions: ‘Through the neck – no bullet left in wound. Windpipe, food-pipe, carotid, jugular, half a dozen smaller, but still formidable, vessels, a great braid of nerves, each as big as a lamp-wick, spinal cord – ought to kill at once, if at all. Thought not mortal, or not thought mortal – which was it?’ The only answer was for him to find his son, as recorded in ‘My Hunt for “The Captain,”’ Atlantic Monthly 10 (December 1862), pp. 738–63.

Holmes Sr.'s essay ‘The Human Wheel, Its Spokes and Felloes,’ excerpted below, combines an examination of the ‘mechanism of walking’ with a celebration of American inventors – particularly Plumer and Palmer – whose products were increasingly in demand as a result of injuries in the war. He attacks the peg leg as inadequate and the crutch as ‘at best an instrument of torture.’ Holmes politicizes the new design for an artificial leg as a sign of US cultural independence and an example of the nation's capacity to combine utility with aesthetic appeal.

J.C. Plumer designed boots and shoes based on the anatomical principles of the foot, which were supplied to the army. B. Frank Palmer similarly designed artificial arms and legs, which were also supplied to the army. The Palmer Leg was patented in 1846, Palmer founding the American Artificial Limb Company. For a promotional pamphlet on the latter, see The Palmer Arm and Leg, Adapted for the U.S. Army and Navy by the Surgeon-General, U.S.A. (1865), at https:// archive.org/details/101462403.nlm.nih.gov.