What your hands say about you – according to history

Summary

HistoryExtra Podcast Summary

Episode Title: What your hands say about you – according to history
Host: Eleanor Evans
Guest: Professor Alison Bashford
Date: February 11, 2026

---

Episode Overview

This episode explores the remarkable history of the human hand as both a practical tool and a source of symbolic meaning across centuries. Historian Alison Bashford, author of Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine and Magic, joins host Eleanor Evans to trace how hands have been used to diagnose illness, tell fortunes, and even establish identity—from ancient palmistry to genetics and criminology. The discussion highlights the intersections of science, medicine, magic, and social realities embedded in the history of reading hands.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

The Origins and Inspiration for Studying the Hand

• Alison Bashford describes her serendipitous discovery of handprints in the Wellcome Library's archives, including those of cultural luminaries like Virginia Woolf and a striking palm print of a recently deceased gorilla, Mok (02:18).
  • Quote: “It was one of those images that I had no way into. It was inscrutable to me.” — Alison Bashford (03:09)
• This moment became the starting point for her book, prompting her to trace both the ancient origins and modern continuations of palm reading and hand analysis (03:50–04:06).

Ancient Traditions of Palmistry and Hand Reading

• Hand reading originated independently in China and northern India, but also developed in other traditions, notably within medieval Jewish Kabbalah and Greek physiognomy (04:17–05:48).
• Early practices went beyond fortune-telling, focusing often on diagnosing character traits, health, and the “nature of the soul” (06:13).
  • Quote: “It’s much more about that kind of diagnosis...especially of character as opposed to prognosis or telling the future.” — Alison Bashford (06:25)

Palmistry: Legitimate Medicine and Science

• Bashford emphasizes that hand reading wasn’t always a “fringe” pursuit; it attracted the interest of leading physicians, scientists, and anatomists through the centuries (08:06–08:37).
• Isaac Newton is cited as an example—a renowned scientist who bought palmistry books, not only for their geometrical content, but also due to an interest in esoteric traditions (08:37–09:56).
  • Quote: “Some of the most distinguished scientists all the way along are buying chiromancy books, reading hands, writing about hands, thinking about how they can decode the hand.” — Alison Bashford (08:53)

Roma Traditions and Legal Suppression

• The episode explores how Roma women, associated with palm reading and fortune-telling, were the subject of both fascination and criminalization in Britain, tracing legislation from the “Egyptian” (i.e., Roma) Acts of Henry VIII through vagrancy laws in the 20th century (10:26–11:57).
  • Quote: “One of the clauses...was to render unlawful the telling of fortunes from the palm. And...that clause continues through the 18th century, through the 19th century.” — Alison Bashford (11:22)

The Victorian Era: Proliferation, Class, and Crime

• In Victorian London, palmistry surged in popularity and was perceived as threatening enough for police to employ undercover “clients” (mainly women) to sting palmists on fraud charges (17:29–18:53).
• Bashford shares colorful details from archives about these operations, down to the color of curtains and the ceremonial disclaimers palmists adopted to dodge prosecution (19:02–20:19).
  • Memorable moment: Story of Haji Muhammad, a London palmist claiming multi-generational expertise from Cairo, illustrates both real tradition and the entrepreneurial side of palmistry (20:21–21:41).

Celebrity Palmists and the Victorian Occult

• The dashing Edward Heron Allen is profiled as a “celebrity palmist” who read hands for Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker, blending social cachet with esoteric fascination. His career included US tours, literary work on palmistry, and a penchant for Egyptian relics (22:11–24:57).
  • Quote: “He does it as a kind of an after-dinner friendship exercise ... do you really want me to do this? Because you may not like what I have to say.” — Alison Bashford (23:27)

The Science of the Hand: Classification and Anatomy

• Victorian and French palmists classified hands into types—elementary, spatulate, motive—sometimes using them for national and even religious stereotyping (25:29–27:47).
  • Quote: “They’re saying things like, the spatulated hand is most common in the British Isles... it is a Protestant hand that is also attached to Republicanism.” — Alison Bashford (26:39, 27:36)

The Simeon Line: From Magic to Medicine

• The so-called Simeon line (a single transverse crease across the palm) became a focus for anatomists and geneticists, especially its association with Down syndrome (28:32–31:59).
  • This links palmistry directly to clinical practices; even today, the presence of this line is sometimes part of neonatal checks.

The Rise of Fingerprints and “Dermatoglyphics”

• Francis Galton’s work established fingerprints as uniquely individual, replacing hand signatures and becoming fundamental to criminology and genetics (32:22–35:40).
  • Dermatoglyphics (the study of skin patterns) evolved from Galton’s work, fueling both paternity testing and, regrettably, attempts to map human variation and race via palm and fingerprint patterns (35:41–38:02).
  • Quote: “It’s a continuation of Francis Galton’s fingerprinting statistical work.” — Alison Bashford (38:00)

Scientific Rejection of Racial Hand Theories: Lionel Penrose

• Lionel Penrose, a geneticist and Down syndrome specialist, opposed racial science and eugenics, helping to retire racist terminology in medicine (38:02–40:40).
• His posthumously published work, Fingerprints and Palmistry, symbolically fuses scientific and palmistry traditions (41:13–41:26).

Darwin and the Evolutionary Importance of the Hand

• Darwin considered the freeing of the hands from walking as central to human evolution, shaping intelligence and capacity for culture (42:34–43:33).
  • Quote: “Darwin says, you know, one day so to say, pre-humans...stood up on two legs and that released their hands from locomotion.” — Alison Bashford (42:37)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the scholarly status of palmistry:
  “This is story, not about fringe people or just folk traditions... It captures physicians all the way along.” — Alison Bashford (08:16)

• On classifying hands:
  “The spatula’s hand is most common in the British Isles...it is a Protestant hand that is also attached to Republicanism.” — Alison Bashford (27:36)

• On scientific racism:
  “Shamefully, as the 20th century moved on, the field became much more attached to...racial science.” — Alison Bashford (35:41)

• On Darwin and hands:
  “He writes that the hands were freed from locomotion and that enabled these ancient humans to then use their hands for other things.” — Alison Bashford (42:37)

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:36: Episode introduction and the premise of hand-reading through history
• 01:35–03:40: Alison Bashford’s discovery at the Wellcome Library and the gorilla handprint
• 04:06–07:48: Ancient origins—India, China, Kabbalah, physiognomy, and early meanings
• 08:06–09:56: Palmistry as legitimate science; examples with Newton
• 10:26–12:44: Roma tradition of palmistry and its criminalization in Britain
• 15:10–20:21: Victorian criminalization and undercover operations on palmistry
• 22:11–24:57: The story of celebrity palmist Edward Heron Allen
• 25:29–27:47: Hand shape classification, national and religious associations
• 28:32–31:59: The Simeon line’s connection to Down syndrome and medicine
• 32:22–35:40: Francis Galton and the development of fingerprinting and dermatoglyphics
• 35:41–38:02: The use (and misuse) of hand patterns to classify human groups
• 38:02–41:26: Lionel Penrose on genetics, anti-racism, and integrating palmistry history
• 42:34–43:33: Darwin’s take on hands and human evolution

---

Conclusion

This episode offers a sweeping, nuanced look at how hands have been read, interpreted, and manipulated across civilizations and scientific eras. With warmth, humor, and deep scholarship, Alison Bashford dismantles the boundary between magic and science, showing that the hand has always been a locus for questions about identity, fate, and belonging. From forbidden fortune-tellers to distinguished scientists, the conversation reclaims palmistry's place in the broader history of knowledge—and challenges listeners to re-examine what our own hands might say.

---

Transcript

[Mark Hall]

Record sales have not exactly been stellar. Look, I need this tour. It's the only place I feel like I can breathe again. Based on the incredible true story Tim I'm Mark's walnut. It's my first tour on February 20th. I just want to write something that helps people. You will never understand what I'm going through. Imagine what God can do again. Whatever you're going through, you're never alone. God is standing fire and it is beautiful. I can only imagine. 2 only in theaters February 20th. Rated PG.

[Narrator]

Take a look at your hand, front and back. Now ask what does it say about you? It's a question that, as a species, we've been asking for thousands of years. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, historian Alison Bashford joins Eleanor Evans to explore how the hand has been used to predict fates, diagnose illnesses, and even define identity, tracing the lines from ancient palmistry to modern medicine.

[Eleanor Evans]

As we met this morning, we shook hands and it struck me that there is so much history now behind this gesture for me in thinking about the hands, I don't think I've ever been so aware of my hands as I was reading a book, as I was reading yours. We're going to delve into some of this really fascinating history today. And reading the body, reading the hands, is a practice that is thorough, thousands of years old. And your latest book chronicles this changing search for understanding that we might get from the hands. I'd love to start by sharing with listeners what brought you to find this lens on history.

[Alison Bashford]

I never thought I'd write a book.

[Interviewer]

On the history of the hand, and it's still I wake up sometimes and I'm surprised that I've done this.

[Alison Bashford]

But I've also never enjoyed the research on a book so much.

[Interviewer]

I don't think unexpected and unexpected is always exciting.

[Alison Bashford]

But this entire project and book just came to me in an instant in.

[Interviewer]

A practice that, you know, only those historically appreciate.

[Alison Bashford]

Where I was in a library, in some archives in the wonderful Wellcome Library in London, looking at the papers of a very interesting 1930s medically trained psychoanalynist. Her name was Charlotte Wolf and she took the palm prints of famous famous interwar cultural luminaries like Aldous Huxley and.

[Interviewer]

Virginia Woolf and Maurice Revill and Nijinsky.

[Alison Bashford]

The list goes on and on and on, and the prints are actually there. There are delicate ink handprints and I was really there to look at those because my last book was on the Huxleys. Actually, that was the link and that was fascinating Enough. But I turned the next manila folder, opened it, and there was a huge, delicate print of Mock, the lowland gorilla who had just died in London Zoo. And the print was there. It's huge, it's detailed, it's on this quite delicate kind of rice paper, I suppose, is the best way to describe it. And the wonderful beast had been dead for two days. And the zookeeper had contacted her and said, I know you wanted to take the palm print of Mok the gorilla. He's been dead, but he's in the morgue, but please come in and do so if you want. And the print itself and the story around it was the strangest thing. And I had no way of understanding what. What that print was. I knew what it was, but I had no idea why she was taking it, how she was reading it. The backstory, the forward story. It was one of those images that I had no way into. It was inscrutable to me.

[Interviewer]

And I've learned over the years that, you know, when you open the archive.

[Alison Bashford]

Papers and there's something that you just.

[Interviewer]

Don'T understand, chances are there's gonna be an interesting story behind it.

[Alison Bashford]

And that's the beginning of the book. And really the book is the backstory of the long centuries long backstory to that handprint, but also, perhaps even more surprising to me, the forward story into the 20th and even the 21st century.

[Eleanor Evans]

Can you talk us through the ancient origins, or at least as far back as we can know about who was reading the hand for signs? Whereabouts in the world were they? And what were the various things they might have been looking for?

[Alison Bashford]

We understand that there are two origin places and times. One is in China, and in both of these places, hand reading and versions of palmistry continues to the present, one in China. And the other that I focus much more on is a text in very ancient Sanskrit in northern India, largely, but also over South Asia. And there's that very early medieval amalgam of Islamic scholarship, some archaic Sanskrit texts, the incorporation of ancient Greek work, especially of Aristotle, and then the other ancient layers. That becomes much more important than I ever thought it would. Completely fascinating and beautiful images is a medieval Jewish Kabbalah tradition. And these things, all of these ancient traditions cross over one another time and time again through the ancient world up to the Renaissance. But in the book, there's probably three core ancient traditions. One is the Indian tradition, the other is the Jewish Kabbalah tradition. And there is also ancient ancient Greek Aristotelian tradition, which doesn't deal so much with marks on the hands, but is a physiognomy, this term, which is about marks on the entire body and especially, but not only the face, that becomes important in the story as well.

[Eleanor Evans]

And this physiognomy, this is the idea that you can tell a person's traits or some kind of innate nature by looking at it. What about hands specifically can be found in this sort of time period?

[Interviewer]

So I think what is important to.

[Alison Bashford]

Understand that I learned is that I expect in my search backward from that guerrilla palm print, I thought, oh, this is gonna be a palmistry story, which it absolutely is.

[Interviewer]

But it is so much more than that.

[Alison Bashford]

It's absolutely, as you say, about telling character or the nature of the soul or perhaps qualities of health and disease. It's much more about that kind of.

[Interviewer]

Diagnosis, if we can put it that.

[Alison Bashford]

Way, especially of character as opposed to.

[Interviewer]

Prognosis or telling the future or what.

[Alison Bashford]

The ancients and medieval world called progn. And so that difference between saying the hand might tell expert readers to this day, actually about vocational qualities that match your personality. It may tell you any range of character traits, from stubbornness to willingness to disinterest to greed.

[Interviewer]

And so what I learned in reading, especially the medieval and early modern, but also some of the ancient texts, is.

[Alison Bashford]

This vocabulary for kinds of humans and typologies of humans that to me came.

[Interviewer]

To be more eloquent, if I can.

[Alison Bashford]

Put it that way, than, let's say.

[Interviewer]

Psychoanalytic archetypes or something of the 19th century. They seem to together catch every kind of human that I think I've met in my lifetime.

[Alison Bashford]

And the expertise was about reading lines. Not just lines on the palm, but shapes and patterns, but also proportions of the fingers, the back and the front of the hand, the moisture, the texture of the hand. So I learned very quickly in this project not to just think about classic palm reading. It was a much bigger system for reading the whole hand, including gesture, actually.

[Eleanor Evans]

I think a through line throughout your book. Is that what you've been saying? It's quite easy from this moment in history to dismiss as quackery, as sort of pseudo. But I think something. You make a point. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this. That it is. It's the legitimate medicine of the time. It's important that we do see this study through that lens.

[Alison Bashford]

Absolutely.

[Interviewer]

And this also fell out to me as a kind of a won.

[Alison Bashford]

And I didn't expect, because I started to try and make sense, in fact.

[Interviewer]

But what immediately became apparent to me, and this is what I try to.

[Alison Bashford]

Catch in the book is that from the beginning, this is story, not about fringe people or just folk traditions, although it is that it's something that captures physicians all the way along. And then by the 19th century and certainly into the 20th century, in an.

[Interviewer]

Even more unexpected way to me, it.

[Alison Bashford]

Becomes a formalized part of anatomy, a formalized part of genetics that I hope we can get to. And so from the beginning, all the way through, this is about registers of knowledge, high and low, to put it that way. And some of the most distinguished scientists all the way along are buying chiromancy books, reading hands, writing about hands, thinking about how they can decode the hand, as I put it. And so I very deliberately start the book with Isaac Newton. And I do that because we know he bought then called chiromancy books. He bought one called palmistry, the secrets thereof disclosed. And we know he read it for the geometry and the quadrangles and the triangles that was part of the decoding. But we know he also bought and read this book as one of the world's most eminent and important scientists. We know that he's also reading palmistry books because he's fascinated by the esoteric Jewish Kabbalah tradition as well. So there are physicians and scientists and anatomists and even more to my surprise.

[Interviewer]

Geneticists run through this story of the.

[Alison Bashford]

Hand over 500 years or so.

[Eleanor Evans]

So alongside the way chiromancy is informing legitimate science or mathematics, or it's evolving alongside that. There is also the element that I was perhaps more familiar with as well before coming to your book, the idea of palm reading for fortune telling, divination. Is it right that this tradition sort of came with the Roma people to Britain at least? What can you tell us about how that came to Britain and evolved?

[Alison Bashford]

Yes, as soon as I decided to write this all up into a book, I had to take a deep dive into Roma fortune telling from the hand as well. And if we can cast back to say Newton's century, Newton would have understood, you know, fairly recently arrived in this country, Roma people, as they were then called Egyptians, because the European understanding of Roma people was that their origin was Egypt and they're called Egyptians, hence the term gypsy. And Henry Tudor, some people will know, implemented a range of then called Egyptian acts that actually run through the 18th century. In the 19th century, they're the forerunner of vagrancy acts that actually continue well into the 20th century. And what I became fascinated by is that way back in Henry VIII's time, one of the clauses in the original Egyptian act that was trying to manage these people who had suddenly arrived in this island was to render unlawful the telling of fortunes from the palm. And in fact, to my complete surprise.

[Interviewer]

It'S quite extraordinary actually.

[Alison Bashford]

That clause continues through the 18th century, through the 19th century. It comes into a vagrancy law after the Napoleonic Wars. It sits there through the 1890s where.

[Interviewer]

A whole lot of palmists who suddenly proliferating in the West End are charged, if they don't pay the fines, they're imprisoned by a clause that has its.

[Alison Bashford]

Origin in the Egyptian acts. So that's kind of a continuous story. But all the way along are Roma people themselves, almost always women traditionally telling fortunes from the palm. And we all know the, especially the 19th century, the significance of Roma fortune tellers in Victorian literature, in Victorian poetry, and actually to 18th and 19th century people themselves. And certainly the great success of Roma fortune telling in places like Blackpool, for example, and I have a chapter on that later in the book. And so that is also an ancient tradition that is continuous.

[Quince Brand Representative]

Quince is the place to go to build a timeless wardrobe that's made to last. They're really all about having elevated essentials that feel effortless. And so each piece is designed for layering and mixing. They're the kinds of styles that you'll wear again and again, season over season. And they've got wardrobe staples with quality that's made to last, like 100% organic cotton sweaters, premium denim that's made with stretch for all day comfortable. They have luxe cotton cashmere blends that are perfect for changing seasons. I've been wearing my Mongolian cashmere turtleneck sweater non stop. It's so soft, so comfy and so warm, but also helps me look put together. So it's really the perfect wardrobe staple. And quince works with safe, ethical factories, cutting out the middlemen. So you're not paying for brand markup, you're just paying for high quality clothing. Everything is built to hold up season after season. The stitching, the fit, the fabrics, they're pieces that you'll want to reach for over and over. And you can, because they're made to last. So if you're ready to refresh your wardrobe with Quince, go to quince.comhistoryextra for free shipping on your order. And 365 day returns now available in Canada too. That's q u I n c-e.com historyextra to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com historyextra.

[Shopify Brand Representative]

You didn't start a business just to keep the lights on. You're here to sell more today than yesterday. You're here to win. Lucky for you, Shopify built the best converting checkout on the planet like the just one tapping ridiculously fast acting sky high sales stacking champion at checkouts. That's the good stuff right there. So if your business is in it to win it, win with Shopify. Start your free trial [e-mail] win President's.

[Home Depot Brand Representative]

Day Savings are happening now at the Home Depot with up to 40% off select appliances. Looking to upgrade your fridge? Check out LG's newest model serving up ice in all kinds of styles. Cube crushed craft ice and now new mini craft ice straight from the dispenser. From cold brew to fizzy favorites, these refrigerators will have you entertaining like a pro. Shop President's Day savings, kids and and get up to 40% off plus free delivery on select appliances like LG at the Home Depot. Free delivery on appliance purchases of $1,498 or more offer valid February 5th through the 25th US only. Store online for details.

[Eleanor Evans]

So let's turn to the 19th century People who are drawing on all of this history that you've just described for us. I want to stay on the idea of criminalization just for a moment. What is it that people didn't like about the act of palm reading and how was it variously got around?

[Alison Bashford]

Great question.

[Interviewer]

This incredibly fascinating clause in the Egyptian.

[Alison Bashford]

Acts and then the vagrancy laws right up through into the 20th century actually was about fraudulence. And so it was about trying to limit the damage and the exploitation of the vulnerable, of the easily led. And so there's a kind of attempt to manage or regulate really a very popular pastime. I mean there's a huge market over the centuries, there's a massive market to today there's still a massive market. But the Egyptian acts, this palmistry clause was about putting, putting a lid on a fraudulent practice. And in the early centuries that was also attached to an idea that Roma people themselves loved the idea that they were called Egyptian because Egypt think in the 17th century and earlier there is a quite formal magic, a hermetic tradition that is imagined to have an origin.

[Interviewer]

In and around this mythical place and time called Egypt.

[Alison Bashford]

And over and over again through the centuries, Roma people in British Isles were accused of fraudulence not only through fraudulently telling people's fortunes and gathering money coins for it, but also by fraudulently taking on this Persona of Being Egyptian and taking on what was understood to be a very learned tradition illegitimately, the solicitors.

[Interviewer]

And the lawyers just loved it because.

[Alison Bashford]

It was all about how do you prove or disprove belief and fraudulence?

[Interviewer]

And it becomes, you know, tragic for many people who end up in prison. But as a historian reading through this.

[Alison Bashford]

Material, it was absolutely fascinating.

[Eleanor Evans]

A detail that I really loved is when we go into sort of 1880s and 1890s as part of the story, is it right that police detectives sort of employed women, well, predominantly women, not always, to go and have their palms read and sort of report back on these quote unquote, fraudulent behaviors?

[Interviewer]

That's exactly right.

[Alison Bashford]

And so the story behind that is in the 1880s, 1890s, 1900, up until the First World War, really is this high point of occult revival that many people will be familiar with. And I was familiar with as well, but I had kind of an American spiritualism version of it. And I hadn't ever really thought about the palm readers. But they're proliferating, especially in London and in the West End, and they're taking quite nice rooms, thank you very much, in Bond street and Oxford street and Regent street, and they're crossing too many class, gender, race lines, and there are too many of them for various members of Parliament to ignore. The police become super interested and charged by MPs and others to do something about this proliferating palmistry. And they use this clause in the Vagrancy Act. And so many people are charged and they're fined, and when they can't pay the fines, they end up in prison. And the records of that all sit in Kew.

[Interviewer]

And as you say, the wonderful thing for the historical record and for a historian like myself, is that you're right.

[Alison Bashford]

They sent spies, or let's call them.

[Interviewer]

Undercover officers, into the rooms of these.

[Alison Bashford]

Palmists, charged with the job of writing down every single detail they possibly could and then giving that to the police.

[Interviewer]

And so there before me on the.

[Alison Bashford]

Desk in the Kew archives are report after report after report. That tells me the color of the curtains where you put your money, the bowl of sand that you might put your money in or that might take an imprint of your hand. You're directed through three curtains that the first one was magenta colored, the second one was purple, the third one was something else. And in the room, this was on the wall, this was on the floor. And best of all for me, this is what was told to me.

[Interviewer]

And by then I also learned that.

[Alison Bashford]

The palmists in the West End were so worried because so many of them were charged and put in prison that they were doing disclaimers.

[Interviewer]

And so these police undercover agents, some of whom were ex palmists themselves, who realized that they could make more money with the police doing this job than.

[Alison Bashford]

Reading hands would say, the first thing.

[Interviewer]

When I went through the magenta curtain.

[Alison Bashford]

And I paid my money was that they use the word disclaimer. But they had to sign something saying that this telling of the fortune and what might happen to you isn't completely guaranteed to happen. So I was able to read through those undercover reports which is just so detailed, I was able to read the court cases themselves and I got to.

[Interviewer]

Know in far more detail than I.

[Alison Bashford]

Ever expected these individual palm readers. And some of them, most of them were taking pseudonyms to kind of orientalize themselves is the best way of putting it. And sometimes I wasn't quite sure whether the name was a pseudonym or not. I also learned that I shouldn't always imagine it to be a pseudonym because one of the palm readers that I read who was imprisoned several times over, his name was Haji Muhammad. And first of all I thought, oh, you know, that might be a pseudonym, because that was the practice. And then when I got to the court case, in fact, he declares his expertise to the judge and he says, my father, my grandfather, my grandfather's grandfather have told fortunes from the hand through chiromancy and geomancy for centuries in Cairo. And I've been in London for 35 years and my wife and my six children are in the flat, I think it was on Regent street if I remember correctly. I know the addresses of all of these people. And he says, if I can't continue to do what my family has done for centuries here, I will return to Cairo immediately. I mean, there's brazen, entrepreneurial, brilliant fraudulence.

[Interviewer]

Going on here with some of the characters.

[Alison Bashford]

But for people like Haji Muhammad, who comes from this centuries long learned tradition, there's not a fraudulence at all.

[Interviewer]

I don't think I've ever enjoyed historical research so much. All of that was before me day after day in the wonderful National Archives.

[Eleanor Evans]

Yes, they're fascinating individuals in your book. And fraudulent or not, someone who does capitalize on this interest in spiritualism and the occult is Edward Heron Allen. I wonder if we can turn to his story and how he comes to flourish in this practice.

[Alison Bashford]

Well, Edward Heron Allen. And so the characters that just were leaping off the pages, I couldn't leave them alone. And so I chose my favorites and.

[Interviewer]

Wrote a Suite of chapters in the.

[Alison Bashford]

Middle of the book.

[Eleanor Evans]

He's very dashing.

[Interviewer]

Oh, he's absolutely dashing. And so Edward Heron Allen was surprise to me.

[Alison Bashford]

I'd never heard of him, but he was in the 1880s, he would have called himself a celebrity palmist, mainly because he read the hands of celebrities. But his backstory is strange. You know, he's from a middling wealth solicitor family. His father brings him into the Soho solicitors practice, you know, and he does that for a couple of weeks and.

[Interviewer]

Then decides that can't possibly be his future.

[Alison Bashford]

And actually he is, to the depth of his soul, a bibliophile and a lover of the ancients and of ancient knowledge.

[Interviewer]

And in the 1880s and 1890s, spends already most of his waking hours in.

[Alison Bashford]

The British Library looking through ancient books. And that's where he learned this tradition of chiromancy. And he starts practicing it himself in his rather exciting, dashing London circle that includes actors, actresses, Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker, for example. All of these people have their hands read by him. And he doesn't do it for money at first. He does it as a kind of an after dinner friendship exercise. I mean, it's kind of an exchange that he does.

[Eleanor Evans]

And it's intimate, isn't it, when you're.

[Alison Bashford]

Looking at people's houses, to all of his friends and he always says to them, do you really want me to do this? Because you may not like what I have to say. And all of this is recounted in his brilliant diaries. Again, lucky me for these sources. He becomes so famous that an agent picks him up and says, I want to do a US tour with you. And they get on the steamer at Liverpool, he goes over to the States and sets himself up, is very successful, makes quite a lot of money, but about a year in, starts to get undone and finds that his novelty's worn off, that journalists are more interested in.

[Interviewer]

The fraudster story than the real story.

[Alison Bashford]

And he comes back to London. I think it's perhaps a year and a half later, much reduced, decided that he doesn't want to do palmistry anymore. But what he does do is return to his kind of bibliophile literature. And he writes a lot of books and history books about palmistry and you, you know, as if all that isn't interesting enough, he ends up being one of the late 19th century's most distinguished experts in Persian literature. He also becomes fascinated with the kind of Egyptian link to palmistry. And he goes, like so many people.

[Interviewer]

In that era of Egyptomania, if we can imagine it, goes to Egypt, sets.

[Alison Bashford]

Himself up there, buys himself a mummy, as one does, brings it back to.

[Interviewer]

His eccentric library down near Chichester and sets the mummy up. And the mummy, I believe, is still in the hul.

[Eleanor Evans]

So he's one example of how people are capitalizing on this fascination. At this time, many listeners will know that the Victorian era is also an age of classification, and with that you often get hierarchy. I found there was a moment in your book you talk about the elementary hand, the motive hand, the physical hand, and the spatulate hand. I wonder if you can take us into these sort of shapes or ideas and what they sort of meant.

[Interviewer]

I mean, you're reminding me that when I was doing this research, there was also moments where I just was in these silent archives and libraries, but was laughing out loud with just way too much robustness for the peace of the libraries.

[Alison Bashford]

There's so much that is amusing and strange and bizarre about these texts. And actually, after I spent a lot of time laughing out loud, I switched and I suddenly thought, hang on a moment. I could just keep being amused by all this, or I could start reading it very seriously.

[Interviewer]

And once I did that switch, it.

[Alison Bashford]

Became actually, unsurprisingly, much more interesting. And I learned that you sort of 1860s onwards, there's a French revival of palmistry, where this classification of hands, which is really unexpected, what I learned is it's not just about creases at all. It's about the shape of hand more than anything else. The elementary hand is the least evolved and the least sophisticated. The spatulated hand has these very square fingers. They're highly desirable. The Duke of Wellington has a very famous spatulate hand, apparently, and that was.

[Interviewer]

Drawn and illustrated, and that's reproduced in the book.

[Alison Bashford]

And I'm trying not to laugh again.

[Interviewer]

Now, because it was taken serious at the time when I read about this.

[Alison Bashford]

Classification, character and even national character goes along with certain kinds of hands. It's almost anatomical. And so there's so much literature, not only by the marginal, but by some very central Edinburgh anatomists, for example, who are using these classifications. So we have to take seriously what they took seriously. But they're saying things like, the spatula's hand is most common in the British Isles, and this hand, they say, is essentially a Protestant hand. And so they're even reading a religion and a kind of a national character into shapes of the hand. And the spatulaed hand has qualities of energy, of entrepreneurialism. It was exported to this place called the United States of America, this mid.

[Interviewer]

20Th century author is telling us, and.

[Alison Bashford]

It is a Protestant hand that is also attached to Republicanism.

[Interviewer]

So these hands end up having religious attributes, national attributes, even political attributes.

[Alison Bashford]

It's the strangest thing. This is kind of a mid to late 19th century idea that I found even in the work of someone like Robert Knox, the Edinburgh anatomist, where he's definitely racializing all of this material as well. And it was when I read that suite of books on the hand that I was led actually to the anatomists. And the way in which it just dawned on me one day, of course, the hand and the creases in the hand and the shape of the hand and fingers is the business of plain.

[Interviewer]

Old anatomy as much as it is.

[Alison Bashford]

The business of esoteric occult, highly learned traditions of reading the hand.

[Eleanor Evans]

I want to stay on one of the creases in particular, which has a lot of time in your book, quite rightly. Could you introduce, for listeners who don't know, the idea of the Simeon line, not without its problems. What does it mean? How does the idea of it evolve?

[Alison Bashford]

Yes, the Simeon line was called that first in the 1880s and the 1890s. And it's a line that palmist, then and now an anatomist, I've learned, would understand. I'm looking at my own hand even as I describe this. It's a fused, in Palmer's term, head and heart line. Anatomists and clinicians, and we'll come to the story later, geneticists sometimes would call it the single fold or the transverse, Single transverse crease. And it's a line at the top of one hand that goes from one side all the way across to the other. And about 2% of humans have this, and most, but not all, and that's important. Most but not all of the 2% of humans who have this particular, very distinctive line have down syndrome, trisomy 21. And that correlation started to be known really about 1900, when the down family, themselves, a dynasty really of psychiatrists who run their own asylums, are for people with down syndrome. And the middle member of the family, the middle generation, he had a son with down syndrome and he even on his son's hand, noticed this correlation between people with down syndrome, trisomy and the simian line, as they called it. And so that's the tradition that actually carried forward into the highest level of 20th century genetics, actually. And we can come to that story. But what fascinated me when I went to have a bit of a deep dive into this very Particular line that probably took most of the attention of early psychiatrists, early anatomists and quite a few psychoanalysts and medical doctors like Charlotte Wolf, who climbed into the chimpanzee cages in London Zoo and also took the handprint of Mock the gorilla. She's looking for the simian line because it is clear that again, most, but not all other primates also have this line. And so that that kind of cued me into the way in which hands and various lines in the hands was really core business of primatologists, of evolutionary biologists, of embryologists, because these lines are formed in utero. And so as well as on top of anatomists, this simian line, along with other things became clinical business and research business to the extent that the down family themselves, and thereafter many medical students in fact are still sometimes taught to include in neonatal checks. A quick look to see if this line usually called now the single transverse crease or single fold, but still in some hospitals it's still called the simian line, rather shamefully, but it's still included as a diagnostic method. So that's one of the lines in the book that was quite unexpected and took me into the world of science and medicine and it's why I've subtitled this book A History of Science, Medicine and Magic.

[Eleanor Evans]

We will definitely go into the question of genetics in just a little while, but something we haven't touched on yet. At the same time, the idea of this line is emerging. At the same time that there are celebrity palmists, there are also the idea of fingerprints, another element of the hand that emerges as something entirely individual. Can you talk to us a little bit about Francis Galton and what happens in this?

[Interviewer]

Yes, well, people may have heard of.

[Alison Bashford]

Francis Galton, so people call him the father of fingerprinting. And in fact he's a London based polymath who gave us many things, but one of which was the word eugenics. Actually he was a brilliant statistician and mathematician. He took thousands and thousands and thousands and I mean that fingerprints that are.

[Interviewer]

All in the University College London archives for us all to look at.

[Alison Bashford]

He showed us for the first time time that fingerprints are actually individual. And it's through his statistical work that we know that and that other statisticians then went on to verify that previously fingerprints and thumbprints had been used on occasion as kinds of signatures of an individual, but it was not yet known that in fact what we know now care of Frances Galton, that they are, I mean, it's an extraordinary fact, they are completely individualized patterns. And these patterns are minute, these tiny little patterns which are kind of creases. So I've known that for some time because I've written on Francis Galton before, and in fact, I've looked at his fingerprint work before. I suddenly thought, oh, you know, reading.

[Interviewer]

The hand does involve fingers and it.

[Alison Bashford]

Does involve thumbs and it does involve fingerprints and thumbprints. So I went to have another look at his papers, and to my complete surprise, Francis Galton was also taking palm print whole handprints as well that I'd never seen before. And there aren't as many as there are fingerprints, but they're dotted throughout his papers, even, and I reproduce one of them, a beautiful palm print of his own hand, his own right hand on grid paper. So he's wondering if fingerprints and thumbprints are individual. What about if he expands to the lines and the creases across the whole hand? And so I tell that story in the book and I write about strangely, and I never thought I would imagine Francis Galton in these terms. I started to think of Francis Galton as a kind of a palmist. And actually he knew that his work with fingers and thumbs would be read by people in his own day, perhaps as a kind of palmistry, to the extent that on occasion he would distance himself and he would explicitly say, I don't read the future and I'm not a palmist, and people shouldn't look at what I'm doing in those ways. So it's actually so close that he's set himself apart. Now. I know he was dissembling because he.

[Interviewer]

Was taking prints of his own palm.

[Alison Bashford]

And he was looking at all of those creases, but he's reading them for different kinds of meanings. And then I learned that in fact, there was a whole 20th century discipline that I'd never heard of called dermatoglyphics, Skin derma, glyph engravings, dermatoglyphics. It's named in 1926, and it's a spin off of Francis Galton's fingerprinting and thumb printing, named by us anatomists in the 1920s and carried forward by, you know, some very distinguished mathematicians through the 20th century.

[Eleanor Evans]

And what were they looking for?

[Alison Bashford]

And they're wondering about our lines on the hand in so can we see patterns of inheritance? I know that they even used, because of this idea that perhaps the lines are heritable, that paternity testing was done in the field of dermatoglyphics in the 1930s. And 40s, the more that patterns on the hand were correlated to various syndromes. Some genetic counseling was done with it. And then Shamefully, as the 20th century moved on, the field became much more attached to later 20th century versions of what was in the 19th century called anthropometry, which turned into racial science. Can we distinguish different groups of people, variations and difference of humans by the patterns on their palms? And this continued apace through the 40s, 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. I've read dermatoglyphic studies in physical anthropology journals in the 2000 and they drop the term race, but they substitute the term isolates. They're looking for really isolated communities, reproductively isolated. And this is some pretty clever geneticists are doing this. They're looking for isolated communities across the world to try and work out whether patterns on the hand can be, in genetic terms, phenotypes, external marks on the hand from which variations of humans, so they would say, might be determined. And these studies, anybody can, you know, look up Google Scholar, you will find these studies everywhere very easily. And they're titled things like A study of the hands of five Jewish families in Cape Town. A study of the hands of three Lapland villages Compared to the hands of five Aboriginal Tribes in Arnhem Land. They're those kinds of titles. And literally people are going there doing this very simple research which is taking the prints of the hands and reading those through comparative work. And so entirely to my surprise, I find more and more and more of these. And it's a continuation of Francis Galton's fingerprinting statistical work.

[Eleanor Evans]

That's a staggering link there to draw food for thought. A figure who stands in your book as, again, please correct me if I'm wrong on this, but a figure who's quite anti to this approach is Lionel Penrose. I wonder if you can bring Penrose into this story here. Where does he sit in the story of looking at the hand? What was he using it for in the 20th century and how do you regard him?

[Alison Bashford]

So Lionel Penrose was a Cambridge trained mathematician, went on to become a doctor, was a chess theorist, which means he's a reader of patterns. And I end the book with a chapter on Lionel Penrose because he captured many of these long traditions. He worked as a Down syndrome specialist from the 1930s right through to really the year he died in 1972. He's from a Quaker family, he was opposed to eugenics and he was an anti racist. And that meant for him being deeply opposed to the kind of racial science that I just described, and he's on record for that. And he also is a signatory to one of the letters to. I think it's the Lancet, it might have been the British Medical journal in the 60s, where a bunch of people who had worked in the field said, we're no longer, forgive me for using the term, but we're no longer going to use the term Mongol and Mongolism. We're going to change that term to the term down syndrome that was recommended in the 60s, and that's after the down family, of course, and Lionel Penrose is a signatory to that letter, where essentially the racism of the term itself is what he and many people, and of course, many people with down syndrome and trisomy then and still found objectionable. So he's a very interesting character, an important geneticist. What's interesting to me and why I wrapped the book up with him is that on the one hand is very thoughtful, very kind of humble and charming person. And by the end of his career, Lionel Penrose and his team had correlated about 16 different syndromes. What we now know that are chromosomal syndromes to patterns on the hand. Also in the UCL archives are all of his papers and they are filled page after page after page of careful prints and drawings of, again, patterns on the hand. And then I learned that towards the.

[Interviewer]

End of his life, as a kind.

[Alison Bashford]

Of a gracious medical elder, Lionel Penrose himself became interested in the history of palmistry specifically, and old chiromancy in particular. And he was writing a manuscript for.

[Interviewer]

A book on the history of the.

[Alison Bashford]

Hand, which included a really genuine interest in palmistry and in the history of palmistry. He died, sadly, before this manuscript was completed, but his colleagues and his family.

[Interviewer]

I would believe, and his lab essentially.

[Alison Bashford]

Pulled out sections of it. And his final posthumous article, after the.

[Interviewer]

Most distinguished career publishing in the top.

[Alison Bashford]

Journal everywhere, is an article called Fingerprints and Palmistry.

[Interviewer]

And it's Lionel Penrose, one of the.

[Alison Bashford]

Most distinguished 20th century population geneticists. His final article is on Fingerprints and Palmistry, which is rather a lovely kind of ending. How one ends a history book is always hard, but for me there was.

[Interviewer]

A rather lovely natural gift of an ending, if I can put it that way.

[Eleanor Evans]

Alison, we've been able to pull out just a few bits from your wonderful book today. Before we begin to sort of wrap up, is there anything else that you couldn't leave this conversation without talking about?

[Alison Bashford]

I wanted to write across palmistry, across all registers, you know, in all kinds of different knowledge, but the really distinguished people. There's so many fellows of the Royal Society in this book who would ever have imagined. And I do very deliberately start with Isaac Newton, but the other hugely important person in the story is Charles Darwin. And I just did want to flag that. Darwin is also someone for whom the hand is incredibly important. And there's a whole evolutionary biology line here where Darwin says, you know, one.

[Interviewer]

Day, so to say, pre humans, other.

[Alison Bashford]

Kinds of primates stood up on two legs and that released their hands from locomotion. He writes that the hands were freed from locomotion and that enabled these ancient humans to then use their hands for other things. And it's from those free hands that a different kind of intelligence is worked through by the process of natural selection, from one generation to another, from 1,000 years to another, from one 10,000 years to another. And so for Darwin also, and in this long line of evolutionary biologists and also primatologists, there is this core Darwinian idea that humans stand on their two feet and that leaves all of us two free hands to learn things, to touch things, to grasp things.

[Interviewer]

And as you started this interview with, to shake other humans hands with, that.

[Narrator]

Was Alison Batchford speaking to Eleanor Evans. Alison is professor in History and Director of the Laureate Centre for History and Population at the University of New South Wales and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her book is Dakota including the Hand, A History of Science, Medicine and Magic. And you can find more episodes exploring the hidden histories of the body and belief in the History Extra podcast archive or on the History Extra website.