I am thinking, of course, of the common media portrayal of pirates using crude tools like hooks to replace lost limbs. Was this an accurate portrayal of prosthetic use in an age before modern medicine or is it a hollywood fabrication?
I would like to piggyback here if you don't mind- I am curious how the commonality differed between socioeconomic classes. In my imagination I can only picture dirty pirates with scrappy poor clothing as the ones with pegs/hooks, but what about well-off people? It seems logical they may have been the first to afford most things, but were these crude tools generally obtained due to means (being able to afford) or out of necessity (having a manual labor job so need to improvise a way to keep your livelinhood)?