Alison Bashford, "Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Jan 10, 2026

Alison Bashford, a historian of medicine and science based in Sydney and author of Decoding the Hand, explores centuries of palm-reading and medical hand studies. She traces chiromancy’s global roots, dives into archives of primate and celebrity palm prints, and follows how anatomists, geneticists, and criminologists turned hand lines into scientific and diagnostic tools.

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ANECDOTE

Archive Discovery: Huxley, Woolf, and Mock

Alison Bashford found Aldous Huxley and Virginia Woolf's palm prints in the Wellcome archives alongside a gorilla named Mock's print.
The gorilla's large palm print from 1938 sparked the entire book research into why a physician palmist would print a dead zoo ape's hand.

INSIGHT

Palmistry Emerged From Physiognomy

Palmistry grew from a broader practice of physiognomy, reading bodily features for character and temperament.
This tradition appears across South Asian, Persian, Chinese, and Greco-Arabic texts and influenced European palm-reading practices.

ANECDOTE

Folklorists Traced Roma Palmistry To India

18th–19th century European scholars traced Roma palm-reading practices to India to support linguistic and cultural ties.
These folklorists walked across Europe and the Middle East documenting Roma languages and palm-reading traditions.

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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: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic (University of Chicago, 2025) 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 Dr. 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. Dr. Bashford’s sagacious history of human hands touching and connecting opens wide the essential human pursuit of what lies within and beyond.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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