"For a long time the history of prosthetics has been inextricably linked with the history of war, and thus of men. After World War II, when soldiers were returning from the battlefield, there was a collective anxiety about whether they’d be able to re-enter their families and workplaces. Many people wanted soldiers to come back, and for everything to go back to normal. But an amputation was a physical reminder that things were not the same. “Physicians, therapists, psychologists, and ordinary citizens alike often regarded veterans as men whose recent amputation was physical proof of emasculation or general incompetence, or else a kind of monstrous de-familiarization of the 'normal' male body,” writes the professor David Serlin in the book Artificial Parts, Practical Lives. Serlin describes the ways in which the media and the military talked about these soldiers, pushing for them to be seen as “normal” in the eyes of the public. In 1946, the comic Gasoline Alley featured a man named Bix whose prosthetic lets him be a “normal American guy.” The comic shows Bix stocking shelves, and features a very surprised boss who exclaims, “I didn’t expect he’d be perfectly normal”—before hiring the man on the spot. Professional photographs taken at Walter Reed Army hospital depicted men with prosthetic devices doing “normal” male activities like lighting a cigarette and reading the sports page, their prosthetic legs adorned with “tattoos” of pinup girls."