'Ought I Not to Have Been Grateful?' Wooden Legs as Military Charity, 1800-1850s

In 1814, Sergeant Thomas Jackson received a charitable pension from the Royal Hospital of Chelsea. He also received an item which would come to define him for the rest of his life, marking him out to his contemporaries as a veteran and recipient of public charity. He was given a wooden ‘peg leg’ to help him walk. His later memoirs record his anger at how this item described to him by his patrons: “This new appendage…was to be free of cost – without money – without price; a free gratuitous national gift. Ought I not to have been very grateful? Somehow or other, at that time, I was not”. Jackson’s case demonstrates the relational construction of disabled identity through objects, as previously discussed by Disability Studies scholars like Katherine Ott, Richard Sandell and Jocelyn Dodd. Disability as a concept and as an identity is not only created by one’s relationships to other people or to medical professionals. Disability is also constructed by the role of certain physical objects in one’s everyday domestic life and in one’s perceived ability to participate in wider society through use of such items. By the later eighteenth century, the British military’s mass-produced wooden leg was the main item associated in popular print culture with military and naval veterans, facilitating their rehabilitation back into civilian society. Wooden legs and other medical supports could be made to measure and gifted as prizes to some men or were purchased unseen as second-hand or spoiled goods from hospitals or military depots. They were part of the everyday lives of many former soldiers, with daily maintenance, cleaning and regular repair and replacement. Despite his initial horror, Jackson came to prefer his Chelsea prosthesis over his other more fashionable and less visible prosthesis, gifted to him by well-wishers. This chapter explores the complex social, economic and cultural relationships of men like Jackson and his patrons with these medical supports.