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. From sixteenth-century occult physicians 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.

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.

Read on for a Q&A with Bashford about her astonishing deep dive into the history of palmistry and biometrics.    

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Decoding the Hand is a wonderfully eye-opening book, revealing surprising connections across history, including with modern science and medicine.  What were the origins of the project?

The book’s origin was instantaneous and a complete surprise. Researching my last book on the Huxley family, I opened a folder in the papers of Aldous Huxley’s palmist (!), analyst Dr. Charlotte Wolff. There was the giant palm print of Mok, a lowland gorilla. He had been dead for two days, and the London Zoo’s keeper sent word to Wolff that, finally, it was safe to take Mok’s finger, thumb, and palm prints. But the delicate document was as inscrutable to me as it was arresting and poignant. I couldn’t—then—understand why a clever Berlin-trained doctor, taught by Heidegger, learned in phenomenology, would be reading Aldous Huxley’s palm, let alone climbing into the primate cages and visiting the Zoo’s morgue to record the dead beast’s handprint. I recalled that Charles Darwin had also climbed into the Zoo’s primate cages a century earlier, to observe faces, not hands. Was this physiognomic? Phrenological? Chiromantic? Evolutionary? Once I started to reach back into the eighteenth, then seventeenth, then sixteenth-century texts to understand all this—once I started to read early modern chiromancy books—the question became irresistible, and the answers started to form; to me, strange, unexpected, a constant surprise. Decoding the Hand is the result. 

What do you hope readers will take away from the book with regard to how we view different ways of pursuing bodily knowledge? How have your own thoughts evolved there as a result of your work?

This book has taken me back to my history of medicine roots, but I’ve always written and researched as a late-modern historian. Malthus, c. 1800, already stretched my twentieth-century inclinations. But the delight, opportunity, and challenge in Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic has been to read widely and deeply in early modern and late medieval history, and even further, scholarship on archaic Sanskrit texts on hand-and-body reading, and Aristotelian physiognomy. As a result, I’ve begun to think much more about changing concepts of what’s inside and outside the body—or really its surface, the skin—that is understood to form health, or the self, or identity, or the soul, or diagnostics and prognostics. I’m beginning to perceive the significance of a long shift from a vast outside—the celestial bodies—to a deep inside—DNA. 

While you were working on this project, what did you learn that surprised you the most?

One huge surprise was the prominence and significance of kabbalistic knowledge and practice regarding the hand, both in medieval and early modern manuscripts and printed books, and later in the nineteenth-century occult revival. Another surprise was what unfolded over the twentieth century, a period of history of medicine and biosciences I know best. Once I started looking for hand-readers within conventional medicine and sciences of various kinds, they were everywhere: anatomists, embryologists, endocrinologists, primatologists, evolutionary biologists, geneticists. The so-called “simian line” was the original and key object of inquiry, time and again described as “the joined head and heart line”; palmists’ terms were indispensable. I never expected to find palm prints amongst all those fingerprints in Francis Galton’s papers. Perhaps the biggest surprise was to learn that distinguished population geneticist Lionel Penrose (University College London) studied hand lines geometrically, statistically, and clinically for fifty years, correlating patterns to many syndromes. And to top it off, he and Lejeune—the Paris-based Down syndrome geneticist who discovered Trisomy 21 in 1958/59—corresponded through the 1960s not just on the chromosomal anomaly, but also on palm lines, ridges, furrows, and patterns: what had been called, since 1926, “dermatoglyphics.”

Where will your research and writing take you next?

I’m finishing off lots of pieces from my longstanding work on population—thinking much harder now about fertility decline, and the alarmist response. And with colleagues, I’m finalizing a collaborative collection on Gondwanaland—the modern history of an ancient supercontinent. My next book is forming . . . slowly. 

What’s the best book you’ve read lately?

Anthony Grafton’s Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa is fantastic.  It helped me understand magic, occult knowledge, and secrets. When I learned in my own research that Isaac Newton bought and read astrologer-physician Richard Saunders’ book Palmistry: The Secrets Thereof Disclosed, I knew I had to take a deep dive into the history of occult–-hidden–-knowledge in the period preceding Newton’s seventeenth century. A gripping read on Agrippa and more.

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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.

Decoding the Hand is available now from our website or your favorite bookseller.