wonder she faced unbelievably cruel and insensitive comments from many who saw her (I repeat only a few of the least bad examples):

• ‘Why are you so ugly?’
• ‘If I had to use a wheelchair, I would kill myself’
• ‘Are you a midget?’
• ‘Can you talk?’
• ‘I support the handicapped because I believe in karma and wouldn’t want to come back disabled’
• ‘Can you have sex?’

Even worse were the insinuations that her condition was the result of sinful acts by herself or by her parents / family. One temporary teacher in school shouted at the whole class that they couldn’t walk or talk very well because each one of them were the wages of sin “Your parents are fornicators – Jesus wants to make sure that everybody can tell you be the children of sinners”. This is a powerful example of the complexities, at many different levels, of serious attempts to reconstruct our bodies. In this book, I will describe and explain the diseases and conditions that lead to a desire, or necessity, to provide some form of reconstruction, the state-of-the-art technologies that we use in reconstructive processes, the spiritual aspects, including those of widely divergent religious and social communities, and an introduction to the use of the arts, in its many forms, that are incorporated into reconstructive scenarios.