ABOUT THIS BOOK

The astonishing history of palmistry and biometrics—from occult physicians to the very foundations of modern science and medicine.

Why did Isaac Newton read books on chiromancy, the occult science of hand reading that revealed the secrets of the soul? Why did Charles Darwin claim that the hand gave humans dominion over all other species? Why did psychoanalyst Charlotte Wolff climb into the primate cages of the London Zoo, taking hundreds of delicate palm prints? Why did Francis Galton, the father of fingerprinting, take palm prints too? And why did world-leading geneticists study the geometry of palm lines in their search for the secrets of chromosomal syndromes?

Decoding the Hand is an astounding history of magic, medicine, and science, of an enduring search for how our bodily surfaces might reveal an inner self—a soul, a character, an identity. From sixteenth-century occult physicians influenced by the Kabbalah to twentieth-century geneticists, and from criminologists to eugenicists, award-winning historian Alison Bashford takes us on a remarkable journey into the strange world of hand readers, revealing how signs on the hand—its shape, lines, marks, and patterns—have been elaborately decoded over the centuries. Sometimes learned, sometimes outrageously deceptive, sometimes earnest, and, more often than we ever expected, medically and scientifically trained, these palm readers of the past prove to be essential links in the human quest to peer into bodies, souls, minds, and selves. Not only for fortune-telling palmists were the future and the past, health, and character laid bare in the hand, but for other experts in bodies and minds as well: anatomists, psychiatrists, embryologists, primatologists, evolutionary biologists, geneticists, and more.

Drawing telling parallels between the divination promised by palmistry and the appeal to self-knowledge offered by modern genetic testing, Decoding the Hand also makes clear that palm-reading is far from a relic or simple charlatanism. Bashford’s sagacious history of human hands touching and connecting opens wide the essential human pursuit of what lies within and beyond.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Alison Bashford is Scientia Professor of History and Director of the Laureate Centre for History and Population at the University of New South Wales in Australia. She is a fellow of the British Academy and an honorary fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. Bashford is the author, most recently, of The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution.

REVIEWS

“A daring and joyously intelligent book.”

— The Wall Street Journal, on "The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution"

“A masterpiece."

— The New Statesman, on "The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution"

Best Books of 2022

— The New Yorker, on "The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution"

Best Books of 2022

— The Economist, on "The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution"

“In this compelling and wide-ranging book, Bashford journeys through centuries of interpreters’ fascinations with the hand, the lessons about personality and about fate that its shape and size, its marks and forms, might carry. Questioning and often subverting received distinctions between scientific reason and allegedly occult skill and knowledge, these stories show how histories of palm-reading and fingerprinting, of fortune-telling and of genetics, were often entangled. The book will be an indispensable guide for anyone interested in how the sciences and practices of self-knowledge emerged in modernity, and the many intriguing lives and careers on which they have depended.”

— Simon Schaffer, professor of history of science, University of Cambridge, and coauthor of "Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life"

“Full of delightful historical twists and insights, Bashford argues that the practice of reading signs in the hand has been part of medical diagnostics from chiromancy in late medieval times to modern genetics. She shows how the lines and ridges on our hands have served as a language to those who can read it—a language that tells a story about the inner secrets of the body. Ingenious and fascinating, this is history at its best.”

— Janet Browne, Aramont Professor of the History of Science, Emeritus, Harvard University, and author of "Charles Darwin: A Biography" and editor of "The Quotable Darwin"

“An unexpected joy. Decoding the Hand is a fabulous book that charts a history of the hand from ancient sources to twentieth-century genetics, with both learning and lightness. It offers a broad history, lavishly illustrated, and is built around a series of individually interesting case studies that will appeal to readers interested in the history of the occult and magic as well as those interested in the history of science and medicine. And it is all framed within a broader historiographical argument about the development of medical knowledge and the contested process of disenchantment. As Bashford herself puts it toward the end of the book: ‘This isn’t (just) a history of fun and quirky medicine, it is the history of medicine.’ Excellent.”

— David Stack, University of Reading, and author of "Queen Victoria’s Skull: George Combe and the Mid-Victorian Mind"

“Wonderfully ambitious.”

— The Observer, on "The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution"

“A crowning achievement. . . . Magnificent.”

— Australian Book Review, on "The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution"

“A tour de force of popular science writing.”

— The Sydney Morning Herald, on "The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution"

“A lot of what, and who, we think we are as individuals and social beings is concentrated in our hands. . . . In Decoding the Hand, Bashford is alive to the multiplicity of meanings held by these extremities. There are many stories to be told here, and Bashford tells them well.”

— Diane Purkiss, Literary Review

“Over the centuries some of the finest minds of a given age have been drawn to reading palms and just what the lines may signify. Bashford . . . traces the long and colourful story of palm reading in what she calls a ‘history of bodily semiotics’ and what these signs might tell us medically, scientifically or psychologically. . . . An intriguing history of the human quest to discover the inner life in the outer signs through the prism of palmistry.”

— The Sydney Morning Herald

“In the mid-twentieth century, geneticist Lionel Penrose observed correlations between genetic abnormalities and the creases of the hand, publishing his final paper ‘Fingerprints and palmistry’ in The Lancet in 1973. The hand has long intrigued physicians, embryologists, endocrinologists, psychiatrists and physical anthropologists, notes historian Bashford. This fascinating, well-illustrated history explores the ‘mysterious, curious, and often complex codes by which signs of the hand have been interpreted.’”

— Andrew Robinson, Nature

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part I: The Early Languages of the Hand

Part II: The Modernization and Medicalization of Palmistry

Part III: Decoding the Hand in Twentieth-Century Biosciences

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