Before reporting some of the facts which we have seen, or learned by personal inquiry, we must be allowed, for the sake of convenience, to exercise the privilege granted to all philosophical students, of enlarging the nomenclature applicable to the subject of which we are treating.
Man, according to the Sphinx, is successively a quadruped, a biped, and a triped. But circumstances may change his natural conditions. If he loses a leg, he becomes a uniped. If he loses both his legs, he becomes a nulliped. If art replaces the loss of one limb with a factitious substitute, he becomes a ligniped, or, if we wish to be very precise, a uni-ligniped; two wooden legs entitle him to be called a biligniped. Our terminology being accepted, we are ready to proceed.
To make ourselves more familiar with the working of the invention we are considering, we have visited Mr. Palmer's establishments in Philadelphia and Boston. The distinguished "Surgeon-Artist" is a man of fine person, as we have said. But if he has any personal vanity, it does not betray itself with regard to that portion of his organism which Nature furnished him. There is some reason to think that Mr. Palmer is a little ashamed of the lower limb which he brought into the world with him. At least, if he follows the common rule and puts that which he considers his best foot foremost, he evidently awards the preference to that which was born of his brain over the one which he owes to his mother. He walks as well as many do who have their natural limbs, though not so well as some of his own patients. He puts his vegetable leg through many of the movements which would seem to demand the contractile animal fibre. He goes up and down stairs with very tolerable ease and despatch. Only when he comes to stand upon the human limb, we begin, to find that it is not in all respects equal to the divine one. For a certain number of seconds he can poise himself upon it; but Mr. Palmer, if he indulges in verse, would hardly fill the Horatian complement of lines in that attitude. In his anteroom were unipeds in different stages of their second learning to walk as lignipeds. At first they move with a good deal of awkwardness, but gradually the wooden limb seems to become, as it were, penetrated by the nerves, and the intelligence to run downwards until it reaches the last joint of the member.
Mr. Palmer, as we have incidentally mentioned, has a branch establishment in Boston, to which also we have paid a visit, in order to learn some of the details of the manufacture to which we had not attended in our pleasant interview with the inventor. The antechamber here, too, was the nursery of immature lignipeds, ready to exhibit their growing accomplishments to the inquiring stranger. It almost seems as if the artificial leg were the scholar, rather than the person who wears it. The man does well enough, but the leg is stupid until practice has taught it just what is expected from its various parts.
The polite Boston partner, who, if he were in want of a customer, would almost persuade a man with two good legs to provide himself with a third, carried us to the back part of the building, where legs are organized.
The willow, which furnishes the charcoal for the gunpowder that blows off limbs, is the wood chosen to supply the loss it has helped to occasion. It is light, strong, does not warp or "check" much as many other woods, and is, as the workmen say, healthy, that is, not irritating to the parts with which it is in contact. Whether the salicine it may contain enters the pores and invigorates the system may be a question for those who remember the drugs in the Sultan's bat-handle and the remarkable cure they wrought. This wood is kept in a dry-house with as much care as that intended for the manufacture of pianos. It is thoroughly steamed also, before using.
The wood comes in rudely shaped blocks, as lasts are sent to the factory, seeming to have been coarsely hewed out of the log. The shaping, as we found to our surprise, is all done by hand. We had expected to see great lathes, worked by steam-power, taking in a rough stick and turning out a finished limb. But it is shaped very much as a sculptor finishes his marble, with an eye to artistic effect,—not so much in the view of the stranger, who does not look upon its naked loveliness, as in that of the wearer, who is seduced by its harmonious outlines into its purchase, and solaced with the consciousness that he carries so much beauty and symmetry about with him. The hollowing-out of the interior is done by wicked-looking blades and scoops at the end of long stems, suggesting the thought of dentists' instruments as they might have been in the days of the giants. The joints are most carefully made, more particularly at the knee, where a strong bolt of steel passes through the solid wood. Windows, oblong openings, are left in the sides of the limb, to insure a good supply of air to the extremity of the mutilated limb. Many persons are not aware that all parts of the surface breathe just as the lungs breathe, exhaling carbonic acid as well as water, and taking in more or less oxygen.
One of the workmen, a pleasant-looking young fellow, was himself, we were told, a ligniped. We begged him to give us a specimen of his walking. He arose and walked rather slowly across the room and back. "Once more," we said, not feeling quite sure which was Nature's leg and which Mr. Palmer's. So he walked up and down the room again, until we had satisfied ourselves which was the leg of willow and which that of flesh and bone. It is not, perhaps, to the credit of our eyes or observing powers, but it is a fact, that we deliberately selected the wrong leg. No victim of the thimble-rigger's trickery was ever more completely taken in than we were by the contrivance of the ingenious Surgeon-Artist.
Our freely expressed admiration led to the telling of wonderful stories about the doings of persons with artificial legs. One individual was mentioned who skated particularly well; another who danced with zeal and perseverance; and a third who must needs swim in his leg, which brought on a dropsical affection of the limb,—to which kind of complaint the willow has, of course, a constitutional tendency,—and for which it had to come to the infirmary where the diseases that wood is heir to are treated.
But the most wonderful monuments of the great restorer's skill are the patients who have lost both legs,—nullipeds, as presented to Mr. Palmer, bilignipeds, as they walk forth again before the admiring world, balanced upon their two new-born members. We have before us delineations of six of these hybrids between the animal and vegetable world. One of them was employed at a railway-station near this (Atlantic) city, where he was often seen by a member of our own household, whose testimony we are in the habit of considering superior in veracity to the naked truth as commonly delivered. He walked about, we are assured, a little slowly and stiffly, but in a way that hardly attracted attention.