War Wounds and Veteran Care: Facts Behind the Fiction

June 3, 2025

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Alina K. Field brings facts about the use of prosthetics in the Regency Era as used in her novel Claims of the Heart

June 18 th this year marks the 210 th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo where so many combatants died and others experienced dreadful injuries such as amputations. Surprisingly to me, not every amputee went around thereafter with a sleeve tucked up like Admiral Nelson because of a missing limb. One of them, the Marquess of Anglesey, who lost a leg at Waterloo, had an articulated artificial leg made by James Potts of Chelsea, patented as the Anglesey Leg.

Pare hand courtesy Wellcom Trust via Wikimedia commons

In my novel, Claims of the Heart, the hero is an amputee who lost a hand at Waterloo. One might expect him to walk around with an unmoving carved wooden hand, or one cast from metal like the villain of a movie. Surprisingly, though, by the 19th century, artificial hands were far more sophisticated.

The spring-loaded Pare hand, pictured here dates to the 16th century. It was designed by French military surgeon Ambroise Pare.

In Historical Development of Upper Extremity Prosthetics, Thelma Wellerson reports other improvements by 1818: “A Berlin dentist, Peter Baliff, appears to have been the first to introduce the use of the trunk and shoulder girdle muscles as sources of power to flex or extend the fingers.”

I’ve given my hero, the Earl of Rudgwick, this sort of hand, controlled by a sort of harness contraption.

About the Book: Claims of the Heart

Since a perilous fall, Lucie Macbeth has been seeing more than a settled future as the heiress to a Scottish barony. The visions plaguing her include a man—one far above her class and breeding, and English to boot. He’s engaged to a duke’s granddaughter as well, and thus wholly inappropriate. Though she can’t marry him, and she won’t become any man’s leman, when the Sight warns her of danger to him, her conscience, and her heart tell her she can’t walk away.

Injured at Waterloo, Major Lord Rudgwick has been rusticating in the country teaching himself how to live as a man with only one hand and pondering how to end the engagement he contracted before his world turned upside down. But then a letter arrives from an old army
comrade, requesting Rudgwick’s aid for his daughter, Lucie Macbeth, the woman he met one year earlier, the woman whose claims on his heart he can’t deny.

Buy Link: https://books2read.com/ClaimsoftheHeart

About the Author: Alina K. Field

USA Today bestselling author Alina K. Field earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English and German literature but prefers the happier world of romance fiction. Her roots are in the Midwestern U.S., but after six very, very, very cold years in Chicago, she moved to Southern California where she shares a midcentury home with a gold-eyed terrier and only occasionally misses snow.