EMSI History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Seminar with Heidi Hausse, Auburn University

The USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Seminar will meet with Heidi Hausse, Associate Professor of History at Auburn University, on Friday, October 23, 2026. Professor Hausse’s research focuses on the intersections of culture, medicine, and technology in early modern Europe; her book, The Malleable Body: Surgeons, Artisans and Amputees in Early Modern Germany, examines amputation and prostheses in the early modern period. Her seminar paper is entitled, “Intertwining Threads of Medicine, Disability, and Technology: The Kassel Hand Case Study”:

A sixteenth-century mechanical hand prosthesis in Kassel, Germany, is an artifact without clear provenance. Its user is unknown. Yet, as a prosthetic artifact, it is a rare direct source left by an individual with limb loss or limb difference in early modern Europe. What can we learn about the user from their prosthesis? A collaborative research team sought to answer this question, working together to overcome a silence in the early modern archive by investigating an artifact to develop a picture of an unknown amputee. Combining expertise from historians, mechanical engineers, prosthesis users, and prosthetists, the Kassel Hand case study developed and tested 3D-printed models of a mechanical hand. This talk will pinpoint moments through the arc of the study to explore how the intertwining of different ways of understanding the body in the present led to unconventional forms of insight into the past.

All EMSI events are free and open to the public.