Arriving in August 2025
from MIT Press
There are just a few hundred artisans and craftspeople in the world who hand-make prosthetic eyes.
When they are successful, no one knows their work.
Here is the first book for a general audience about that little-known world of "ocularists" -- a world of traditional apprenticeships and multi-generational family businesses, of slow and meticulous sculpting and painting, of intimate, compassionate care rare in a fast-paced and bureaucratic medical world.
Eyes by Hand: Prosthetics of Art and Healing provides a fascinating look into the making of artificial eyes that look uncannily real, as well as the psychological and emotional healing that such service brings to anyone who has suffered the very visible trauma of eye loss—a loss that can go to the heart of self-identity.
Preorder Now
Advance Praise
“Combining historical analysis and anthropological insight with a journalist’s flair for feature writing, Dan Roche’s new book is a superb contribution to histories of prosthetics and the human stories embodied in their design.”
​
--David Serlin, author of Window Shopping with Helen Keller: Architecture and Disability in Modern Culture
​
​
​
"A groundbreaking contribution to disability studies that demonstrates the power of personal writing.”
​
--Jeannie Vanasco, author of The Glass Eye
​​
​
“Eyes by Hand is an engrossing journey through a relatively unknown area in which art intersects with medicine.”
--Stephen McLeod, MD, CEO of the American Academy of Ophthalmology
​
​
"An engaging insight into the lives of artificial eye users and makers past and present. Dan Roche’s thoughtful approach provides a new model for autoethnographic academic writing."
--Ryan Sweet, author of Prosthetic Body Parts in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture and designer of Legless in London, the board game
Why this book?
I got a prosthetic eye in 2009. I'd wanted it for years, after five decades with a natural eye that had never worked and that was slipping rapidly into even more disfigurement and pain. The new eye itself was -- at the risk of sounding hyperbolic -- life-changing, at least for my psychological state and my comfort in being looked at, which meant everything in my day-to-day human interactions.
​
As much as I loved (and continue to love) the new eye, I also loved discovering that there are people who make eyes. I hadn't known. I mean, I'd known abstractly, because I'd seen fake eyes in movies and had pined for one myself. But I'd never known anything in particular about those folks.
​
So I did some interviews and some research, and I wrote an article. The subject appealed to me not only because I had a personal stake in it, but because I'm drawn to places where art and technology and science intersect. I was trained in college as a mechanical engineer, but I soon admitted to myself that I preferred working with words more than with numbers, and I left engineering to become a writer and an English professor. In the years after I published that article on eye-making, I always knew there was a entire book to be written on the subject. No one else had done it, at least not for a general audience of people like me.
So I did a lot more research, scouring libraries and the internet for historical articles on ocular prosthetics. I conducted many more interviews. I visited ocularists (the cool name for eye-makers) across the US. I went to a couple of their annual conferences and did more interviews. I traveled to Germany to see firsthand how glass eyes are made, because that is one of the only places where prosthetic eyes are still made from glass. The rest of the world uses acrylic.
I also interviewed people who wear prosthetic eyes. All of their stories were different from mine in the specifics. Many of them lost a natural eye much more traumatically than I did. Car wrecks. Gun shots. Blunt trauma. Cancer. Freak accidents involving thorns on a rose bush or thumb tacks or car keys or drills or golf balls. (It's horrifyingly easy to lose an eye, that most vulnerable of physical attributes.) But all of the stories were ones of healing. Physical healing, yes, but also deep healing of the psyche, of the emotions, of self-identity. Not total healing, usually. (And not vision, because current prosthetic eyes don't yet provide that.) Even in my own case, the self-consciousness that colored so much of my childhood and adulthood still vibrates at some almost imperceptible but annoyingly tangible level. One's eyes are so determinative, so visible ("windows to the soul," etc.). And even the most beautifully crafted prosthetic eye, even a true work of art, can only provide an illusion. Sometimes that illusion is amazingly realistic, and sometimes, because of extensive damage to an eye socket, say, there is only so much even the most talented ocularist can do.
​
Still, the stories of healing resonated with me. They felt sincere, intensely transformative, and were sometimes (at the risk of sounding hyperbolic) life-saving. They always choked me up.
​
So, here is a book which I hope will tell a story not told in this way or to this extent before. I wrote it for my fellow wearers of prosthetic eyes, and for their families and friends. I wrote it for anyone curious about a kind of intimate caring and passionate craftwork that is disappearing in an increasingly digital and bureaucratic world. And I wrote it in gratitude for those people who make eyes. Discovering their existence and their work has been thrilling, wholly illuminative, and -- not hyperbolic at all -- life-changing.