Ivory leg

History

Captain Ahab in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) uses an ivory leg that causes him considerable pain and discomfort. In real life, ivory was used in the internal mechanisms of artificial legs created by makers such as Douglas Bly and John S. Drake. For more on this topic, see Ryan Sweet’s free 2022 book Prosthetic Body Parts in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture.