Anglesey leg

History

James Potts made what is often considered the first modern artificial leg in 1816 when he supplied Henry William Paget, Lord Uxbridge, with a prosthetic replacement for the leg that he famously lost in the Battle of Waterloo. Potts’s prosthetic was hailed as a great success by Uxbridge, who was newly titled as the Marquess of Anglesey. The prosthesis came to be known interchangeably as both the Anglesey and the “clapper” leg—so called because of the noise it often made when walking. This device is discussed throughout Ryan Sweet’s free 2022 book Prosthetic Body Parts in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture.