W&M Featured Events
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[PAST EVENT] "Making Men: Prosthetic Promise and Potemkin Limbs at the end of WWII"
October 8, 2015
5pm - 6:30pm
By the end of World War II, millions of Red Army soldiers returned home permanently disabled. One of the chief avenues through which the state responded to the challenges they posed was the development of the prosthetics industry. Artificial limbs seemed to offer a tangible solution to healing veterans' bodies enough to get them back to work, the single biggest priority of the post-war years. The most widely celebrated of these devices was the Kononov arm. Yet despite the state's attention and financial support, the prosthesis was a failure. The story of Kononov's arm helps to understand the larger systemic failures of Soviet post-war technology.