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

“Delightful.”―Times Literary Supplement • “Intriguing.”―The Sydney Morning Herald • “Fascinating, well-illustrated.”―Nature • “Altogether surprising and hard to categorise.”―London Review of Books • “There are many stories to be told here, and Bashford tells them well.”―Literary Review

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.

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 Fellow of the British Academy and Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. In 2021, she received the Dan David Prize for her contributions to the history of medicine.