Episode 4: The Man with the Knife-Hand Prosthetic

In this episode, the Accessible Medievalist delves a bit into the history of prosthetics, especially the story of a man from the Longobard area of Veneto, Italy, between the sixth and eighth centuries CE, who had an amputated hand and a knife-hand prosthetic.

Bibliography:

"A Call to Spy.” Blesma: The Limbless Veterans, May 4, 2021. https://blesma.org/news-media/blesma-news/2021/a-call-to-spy/, accessed February 27, 2026.

Ashmore, Kevin, et. al. “ArtiFacts: Gottfried ‘Götz’ von Berlichingen-The ‘Iron Hand; of the Renaissance.” Clin Orthop Relat Res 477, no. 9 (September 2019): 2002-2004.

Binder, Michaela et. al. “Prosthetics in antiquity—An early medieval wearer of a foot prosthesis (6th century AD) from Hemmaberg/Austria.” International Journal of Paleopathology 12 (2016): 29-40. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1879981715300231.

British Museum. “cartonnage (prosthetic toe).” https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA29996, accessed December 27, 2025.

Daley, Jason. "This 3,000-Year-Old Wooden Toe Shows Early Artistry of Prosthetics.” The Smithsonian Magazine, June 21, 2017. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/study-reveals-secrets-ancient-cairo-toe-180963783/, accessed December 25, 2025.

Egyptian Museum. “Prosthetic toe of Tabaket en Mut.” https://egypt-museum.com/prosthetic-toe-of-tabaket-en-mut/, accessed December 27, 2025.

el Damaty, Sarah, Simon Hazubski, and Andreas Otte. “ArtiFacts: Creating a 3-D CAD Reconstruction of the Historical Roman Capua Leg.” Clinical orthopaedics and related research 479, no. 9 (2021): 1911-1913. https://journals.lww.com/clinorthop/citation/2021/09000/artifacts__creating_a_3_d_cad_reconstruction_of.8.aspx.

Li, Xiao, et. al. "Archaeological and palaeopathological study on the third/second century BC grave from Turfan, China: Individual health history and regional implications," Quaternary International 290-291 (2013): 335-343. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1040618212003370.

Micarelli, Ileana, et al. “Survival to amputation in pre-antibiotic era: a case study from a Longobard necropolis (6th–8th centuries ad).” Journal of Anthropological Sciences 96 (2018): 1–16.

Sajjadi, S.M.S., M. Casanova, L. Costantini, and K.O. Lorentz. “Sistan and Baluchistan Project: Short Reports on the Tenth Campaign of Excavations at Shahr-I Sokhta," Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies 46, no. 1 (2008): 307–34. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/05786967.2008.11864751?needAccess=true.

Credits: 

Music - Medieval Theme 01 by Strobotone is licensed under a Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

Sound - WinHarpsichord.wav by Fupicat; License: Creative Commons 0

Song - James Bond (Original) - Theme Song from the Internet Archive

Transcript

Medievalist. Accessible Medievalist. And this is the Man with the Knife-Hand Prosthetic. 

Welcome to the Accessible Medievalist! I am Dr. Kisha Tracy, your host. And apologies for the introduction. I couldn’t resist the temptation of a James Bond-like title for our subject today!

Today, we are going to focus on one of my favorite stories of medieval disability. And if there is anyone listening out there who makes movies or has influence with a film maker, please take note because there is definitely potential here! 

A man, between forty and fifty years old, lived in the Longobard area of Veneto in Northern Italy between the sixth and eighth centuries CE. The Longobards were a Germanic people who migrated from northern Europe to conquer significant parts of Italy during this time period. This man had an amputated hand, caused by “blunt force trauma to the forearm,” that he lived with for some time. With his body, found in a necropolis, was a prosthetic in the “form of a cap with a modified bladed weapon attached to it.” In other words, he had a knife-hand prosthetic!

The hand was bent over the man’s stomach. Due to the way it was positioned and because of the wear on the arm, including round-shaped callus on the bone, the archaeologists deduced that the knife was a prosthetic that he used in daily life. 

Since reading the study by Ileana Micarelli, et. al., I have been fascinated by this individual! What is his story? Why was his hand amputated - battle, injury, accident, punishment? Why a knife hand?

In thinking about this individual as well as researching for a talk for my university’s Community Read program about a year ago, I began looking into the history of prosthetics. I was quickly intrigued by the archaeological evidence. The Cairo Toe is perhaps the oldest prosthetic we have, from the early first millennium BCE and found in Egypt on a female mummy about fifty or sixty years of age. The wooden big toe was attached with a strap. We can surmise that it was used - and not just an ornament for a mummy - because the wearer’s amputation site was healed and the prosthetic was refitted several times.  Our Longobard man also showed signs of healing post-amputation, which his researchers have interpreted to indicate a community to assist with healing and the medical knowledge to “prevent death from blood loss.”

To return to the Cairo Toe - if you are someone who has never thought much about your big toe, you would be surprised how much work it does! It provides balance and stability, but it also helps us springboard ourselves forward. Unlike the experience of losing a limb, absence of the big toe certainly does not prevent walking or running, but generally it can lead to changes in gait and the body has to learn to compensate for it, which is something that a prosthetic can help with. The Cairo Toe does have mobility, and it is possible that it helped the wearer walk. Researchers are still trying to figure that out, however, through the testing of replicas. We can contrast it with another Egyptian toe prosthetic from approximately 1295 to 664BCE. This toe does not bend, has a spot for the toenail that may have been decorated. Instead of being strapped on, holes around the edges indicate it would have been sewn to a sock or sandal strap to keep it in place. If you can imagine having something sewn on as an attachment, especially to a foot, it doesn’t feel likely that it would have been that practical - or that comfortable!

One of the more important parts of prosthetic technologies is how they are attached to the body. In truth, a prosthetic is only as functional as that connection. Our Longobard man was found with a D-shaped buckle close to the end of his right forearm. There was also decomposed organic material that the researchers identified as most likely leather, which were probably bindings. We do have evidence of other similar attachments - such as a circular iron ring found with a thirty-five to fifty-year-old male in Hemmaberg, Austria from the sixth century CE. What is truly fascinating is that we can actually speculate about the Longobard man’s daily experience based upon other observations about his body. In particular, there is a specific pattern of tooth wear paired with what they call a “reorientation of the shoulder joint” that indicates that “tightening the prosthesis with his teeth placed the shoulder joint in an abnormally extended position and that this happened frequently.” Essentially, he used his teeth to tighten the straps of the prosthetic in place, and that motion caused some damage to his right shoulder over time, having what they call “a profound effect on his dental and skeletal morphology.” I think it is also interesting that they noted a difference in how his arm was positioned as opposed to the other males buried nearby. In his case, his arm was bent over his body whereas the arms of the other males with knives were at the sides of the bodies. 

Before the discovery of the Cairo Toe, we had the Roman Capua Leg from 300BCE Italy, found with a male skeleton missing a lower right leg. Unfortunately, we HAD this leg in the past tense because the original was destroyed in an air raid in WWII in London. Yay for copies and 3-D printing! The wood of the leg was covered in bronze. It had to be pretty heavy and cumbersome!

The Community Read book that I spoke about before was The Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnel, which is about Virginia Hall, an incredibly badass WWII spy, who was known as “The Limping Lady.” Prior to the war in 1933, she was injured in a hunting accident in Turkey. Gangrene set in, and her leg was amputated. She was fitted with a prosthetic, which she named "Cuthbert.” Interesting to contemplate here if Cuthbert was named after Saint Cuthbert! At any rate, Cuthbert was made of wood, metal struts, and an aluminum foot, weighed over seven pounds, and was attached by leather belts around the waist.

Producer, writer and actress Sarah Megan Thomas wrote the screenplay for the film A Call to Spy, about WWII female agents, in which she plays Virginia Hall, has commented on Cuthbert: “Most prosthetics at that time were made for men...They were heavy items so, added to the fact that it didn’t even fit her, Virginia had to contend with the increased pressure on her back and hips...She got blisters all the time and I spoke to her family who confirmed that she was in pain every day. But she actively tried to hide it as she didn’t want to be looked at in a different way.” Hall had every right to be concerned about discrimination. In 1937, she was turned down for United States Foreign Service because of a rule against hiring people with disabilities as diplomats (even an appeal to FDR, himself disabled, was unsuccessful). She went on to become “the most dangerous of all Allied spies,” even managing to escape across the Pyrenees in the winter of 1942.

My fiance plays video games. Me - I love absolutely everything about video games…except the actual playing of them! So, since we have been together, I have been delighted to get a more detailed look at them, and I’ve been interested in how many characters have a prosthetic, particularly a prosthetic arm. There is Barret Wallace in Final Fantasy VII. Johnny Silverhand in Cyberpunk 2077. The title character of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Jax in Mortal Kombat. In these games, an interchangeable body part is quite useful. Whenever you find a new weapon, they can be easily changed out, making a prosthetic valuable. And prosthetics also make it easy to explain how characters have been saved or resurrected - like Commander Shepard in Mass Effect. In worlds where technology is powerful and implants are expected, prosthetics are no longer othered. They are normalized. To a point at least. There are usually questions that arise about how much of a person must be “human” to be considered a human being: think Darth Vader or RoboCop. This leads to so many different terms and ideas to consider: Cyborg, Robot, Bionic, Android, Transhuman, Cybernetics. 

Almost all of these concepts grapple with the “perfect” or “normal” - even Platonic - idea of the body. What is a “whole” body? Does that definition change? Is it tied to concepts of “beauty”? Katherine Ott, a curator of the division of medicine and science at The National Museum of American History, has said:  “Though many of these early prostheses were likely challenging and uncomfortable to wear, 'they prevent people from staring and make the user feel more integrated [into society]’.” This gets into the social model of disability that asserts humans are not actually disabled by physical impairments, but rather more by how society perceives that disability. The researchers studying the Longobard man speculate that, given his survival and the circumstances of his burial, that he was cared for by his community, but they do wonder if compensations had to be made for him. This train of thought does seem a bit of a stretch because we do not know enough about his individual circumstances to really make a determination. But it does raise the specter of access - what happens if an individual does not have access to care? To a prosthetic? 

Our Longobard man did not have a prosthetic that even attempted to look like a human hand. Katherine Ott has also said that “[g]enerally prosthetics that mimic body parts don’t work as well...They are usually clumsy and fatiguing.” Here, I think about a  prosthetic leg found in China dating from approximately 300-200BCE, found with a fifty to sixty-five-year-old male who experienced tuberculosis. It used an Asiatic ass (or horse) hoof. Why? Because that animal has excellent sink resistance! When something works, use it! 

Today, we see athletes with prosthetics that are designed to allow them to perform, but do not necessarily look like human limbs. And, with the 2026 Winter Paralympic Games coming up soon, we will likely once again see arguments about the unfair advantage prosthetic technology gives athletes with disabilities, despite the research and evidence that has disproven this belief. It’s likely this type of continued discrimination is why prosthetics still lean towards the cosmetic instead of the purely functional. 

Women in particular seem to contend with the questions of cosmetic prosthetics. Think about an eye prosthesis from 2900-2800BCE Iran, found with a female twenty-eight to thirty-five-year-old. This eye was worn like a patch and would not have helped the wearer see - and, thus, was purely cosmetic. YET there is evidence of abscesses, which are believed to have been caused by continued infection from wearing it. I shudder to think about it. I also am curious that there are at least three known Egyptian prosthetic toes, all of which are from female bodies. I know this does not prove anything in particular, but it does make you wonder about how women in particular might feel societal pressure to think about appearing “normal,” even above their own health. Consider Virginia Hall.

One main function of prosthetics is to make it possible for an individual to continue participation in daily life, particularly their profession or activities like athletic performance. A famous late medieval individual Gottfried “Götz” von Berlichingen, also called Götz of the Iron Hand, lived from 1480 to 1562CE. He was an imperial knight and mercenary in Germany. His right arm was amputated at the wrist during a siege in Bavaria. His first prosthetic was very rudimentary, made according to legend by a blacksmith, out of necessity. It does not move, making it much more of an iron claw and cosmetic. The second one he had created has jointed fingers and is capable of holding objects. He actually could set it so that it could hold a sword or another weapon, which was more practical. Götz continued to function as a knight and mercenary for at least another forty years. 

We cannot know for sure that our Longobard man needed a knife-hand prosthetic to continue his work or everyday activities, but it is indeed possible. One question I often get when I mention him is: did he have other attachments other than a knife? We honestly don’t know, but it’s interesting to think about! We do know that he attached the knife on a regular basis, that he did so to the point that it left evidence on his body, and that he was buried with his prosthetic.