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Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic

Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic

          
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About the 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.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Author’s Note on Terminology Secrets Disclosed: Taken by the Hand Part I: The Early Languages of the Hand 01 Origins: Physiognomy and Chiromancy 02 Reading the Palm Across Indo-European Worlds 03 The Hand in Victorian Science and Medicine Part II: The Modernization and Medicalization of Palmistry 04 The Cheirosophy of Edward Heron-Allen 05 Fortune and the Law: Cheiro and Keiro 06 Commercial Hands: The Ellis Family 07 The Medical Palmistry of Katharine St. Hill Part III: Decoding the Hand in Twentieth-Century Biosciences 08 Fingerprints: Francis Galton’s Doctrine of Signatures 09 Anatomists of Race and the Simian Line 10 The Hand That Speaks: Charlotte Wolff 11 The Hand in the Age of Human Genetics: Lionel Penrose Conclusion Occult Medicine and the Lines of Fate Acknowledgments Notes Select Bibliography Index


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Product Details
  • ISBN-13: 9780226831152
  • Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
  • Publisher Imprint: University of Chicago Press
  • Height: 229 mm
  • No of Pages: 400
  • Sub Title: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic
  • Width: 152 mm
  • ISBN-10: 0226831159
  • Publisher Date: 05 Nov 2025
  • Binding: Hardback
  • Language: English
  • Returnable: Y
  • Weight: 454 gr


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