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Alison Bashford, "Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
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A
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B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Professor Alison Bashford about her book titled Decoding the A History of Science, Medicine and Magic, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2025. Now, obviously, any book that has the subtitle of A History of Science, Medicine and Magic is going to be fascinating and interdisciplinary. And this book absolutely does that, taking to a whole bunch of different places and times and things that today we might see as being very separate from each other, but actually turns out are way more interconnected than we might assume. For instance, Isaac Newton, famous for all manner of scientific principles, was really into the occult science of hand reading, for instance. Why? Well, I think that's going to be one of the things we discuss. So, Alison, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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C
Wonderful to be with you. Miranda, could you start us off by.
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B
Introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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C
Yes, yes, of course. So I'm a historian. I'm a professor of history currently in Sydney in Australia, and I've worked in the US and the UK previously, and I was long ago trained, really, as a historian of medicine primarily, and have worked through Various history of other sciences, largely biosciences, biological sciences, and I've written on history of eugenics and history of population matters. And this book literally started in a nanosecond as I opened up a wonderful archive folder in the welcome Collection, the archives of the welcome Library in London, and something emerged that I hope we can talk about that just. I didn't understand. And it was one of those. Those great moments as a historian where I always say this to my students. If you're looking at something in the archives and you can't make head or tail of it, then that's the moment to stop and wonder if there's a story to tell.
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B
Yeah, that's my absolute favorite kind of origin story of a book is a chance encounter in an archive or with sort of any kind of bit of information going, what is. Hang on a second. Right. Like, that's such a fun thread to pull. So do you want to reveal now.
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C
What that thing was? I'm so happy to. So my. My previous book was on the Huxley family, the famous dynasty of scientists and scientists, science writers, including Aldous Huxley and Aldous Huxley. Huxley listeners may know this, but he was quite interested in the weird and the wonderful, and he wrote Doors of Perception and other things. And so perhaps it's not a surprise that Aldous Huxley liked to have his palm read. And I knew that when I was researching the book on the Huxley family. And it just so happened that I kind of scratched around a little bit, and it wasn't hard to find out who exactly was reading Aldous Huxley's palm. And it turned out that her papers. She's a medical doctor trained in Berlin, very smart, psychoanalytically trained as well. And her papers are kept in the welcome Collection in London, in Houston Road. So I. A bit on the off chance, I mean, the fact that Aldous Huxley had his palms read wasn't critical to my last book, but I just had a hunch that since I knew who his palmist was, why don't I go and have a look? And I opened up the first box of papers, and there it was, magnificent enough, there was Aldous Huxley's own palm print, and she took those in ink and printed people's palms. And then I opened the next folder. There was Virginia Woolf's palm print, Andre Gide palm print, Any Name, an interwar cultural luminary. And there were their hands. So that was pretty fascina. But here's the thing. I opened the next manila folder and there was a print there that was larger, way larger than any of the others, and that's because it was the palm print of Mok, the lowland gorilla. This is 1938. Mok, the lowland gorilla, then kept in London Zoo. And Mok, I learned, had been dead already for two days, and he was in the zoo's morgue. And the zookeeper messaged, wrote to Charlotte Wolf, the doctor, Aldous Huxley's palmist, and said, I know you wanted to take a palm print of Mock. It was too dangerous when he was in the cage. But he's dead and he's lying in the morgue, and you're welcome and able to come and take those palm prints now. And that's what I was looking at. And that's exactly what I couldn't make head or tail of, couldn't understand why she was doing it. What is that doing there alongside the prints of Aldous Huxley's hands and so forth? And that was the moment exactly as you responded to where I sat up. It was inscrutable to me. And that's the most delightful moment that you don't know when it's coming and you can't make it up. But the strangeness of that palm print was the moment when I started digging around and then couldn't stop for years, and decoding the hand is the result.
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B
That's such an amazing moment. Thank you for taking us into the archives in a way with you to have that starting point. But of course, that's not the end point. The end point, as you've mentioned, or at least one end point, is the finished product of the book where you went around and investigated and managed to make sense of that moment. So let's see what we can make sense of here. Obviously, this particular person's archive that you found was not the beginning of palm reading or the idea that kind of one could decode the hand. So when do we see kind of that beginning? And why is this idea of kind of chiromancy a consistent thing across time?
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C
Yes, it is consistent across time. And so that's exactly. You know, once I thought, what is this print and why is this doctor reading it? You know, she's very clever, she's analytically trained, she's medically trained. And I started going back through two lines. One is palmistry itself, what in medieval and early modern times was called more often chiromancy, from the Greek word for the hand. And the other line, we might talk about a little later, is a kind of a medical and anatomical line of reading the hand. But I thought, I thought, you know, I knew absolutely nothing about palmistry. I'd never had my palm read, I wasn't particularly interested in it, but I really wanted to understand this gorilla's palm print and why it was so interesting. And so I started digging around and literally went backwards in time. In the wonderful British Library mainly and Cambridge University Library I was able to look at 18th century chiromancy books or palmistry books and they were often kind of to go backwards in time. They, they were more light hearted books for parlor games or Entertainment. In the 18th century, when I went back another century into the 17th century, I quickly learned, as you say, that Isaac Newton was reading and collecting chiromancy books. And I was able to go and look at his own chiromancy books and it was no longer a game. You know, Isaac Newton is a very serious person. This was an occult tradition and occult means the idea of a hidden knowledge. So from there I started to go back through medieval and in fact some ancient, some ancient chiromancy and ancient palmistry. And that's where I find it. In very early texts in an Indian tradition and a larger South Asian tradition in Greek traditions there's not so much palmistry or chiromancy but there is a very related field of knowledge which became very important. In my book which was called physiognomy and Aristotle or the group of texts that we come to call Aristotle's writes about this phenomenon of physiognomy and that is this detailed way in which any part of the body can be read in a way that would show character is the term that was often used. So this detailed description of how if you've got a certain shaped nose, you'd have a certain character, if you've got coarse and curly hair, that is a sign of another character. He would say if you hold the hands flabbily, that has a temperament attached to it as well. So it's a way physiognomy became really important. I learned from the earliest times this quite common across many cultures, Indian, Persian. There's a Chinese tradition, ancient Chinese tradition as well, of reading sometimes all parts of the body, but especially the face and the eyes, but also the hand and reading all of these different parts of the body, the body surface for signs of what's within, often understood to be a sign of person, what came to be called personality or temperament. And so really out of that umbrella idea of physiognomy, chiromancy or palmistry developed as A more specific, more specific knowledge. But there's very, very ancient, ancient roots to this tradition that gets picked up across Islamic traditions, definitely across Jewish and in many, many Hebrew texts and in ancient Sanskrit texts as well.
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B
This is really interesting to have a sense of kind of how far back and across how many different cultures these ideas go. And I was intrigued as well about your mention there and of course in the book around the ancient Chinese or the ancient South Asian traditions. Because I think quite often when we think about the sort of 19th century palmistry hand reading, you know, the famous people you mentioned earlier, there is often an idea that these are sort of Orientalist practices. Is it because of those links with ancient traditions that come from places like China or India? Or does that kind of Western orientalist tinge come in a different way?
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C
No, it's absolutely got a root in especially South Asian Persian Middle east traditions. And it's those ideas that are kind of being pulled over to the west into, into Europe rather more than Chinese traditions in the first instance. And of course when we think about palmistry, you know, many, many, many listeners. Did I say readers before? Many listeners, many listeners would immediately make the link with so called gypsy Roma communities and Roma palm reading, which is very old and of course continues to this day. And in the 19th century, you know, late 18th and 19th century, there's an idea actually that Roma palm readers and Roma people didn't come from what we now understand to be north India or around Persia, but in fact came from Egypt. And the term quote unquote gypsies in English is a shortening of Egyptian. And in the 19th century there's this fascinating field of knowledge where various quite learned Orientalists and linguists in 18th and 19th century Europe are tracking what they called Indo Aryan languages, Aryan languages, sometimes called Indo Aryan languages, the connection between largely North Indian languages and many European languages. And they become quite interested in Roma practices of palmistry also as evidence that Roma people didn't come from Egypt at all, as had been thought for many centuries, but in fact came from India. And so there's a lot of records that I was able to look at from these 19th century orientalists really deeply engaged with Roma palm reading, with Roma languages around the hand. And they worked all their way across Europe and the Middle east finding essentially as kind of ethnographers or anthropologists searching for Roma, Roma traditions, specifically about getting, you know, aiming to thicken, so to say, their knowledge of connections between especially north India and Europe, the Indo European world of shared language and shared practices. So it's really the, the Indian ancient traditions that become most important in setting up traditions in Europe. Well, the holidays have come and gone once again. But if you've forgotten to get that special someone in your life a gift. Well, Mint Mobile is extending their holiday offer of half off unlimited wireless. So here's the idea. You get it now, you call it an early present for next year. What do you have to lose? Give it a try@mintmobile.com Limited time, 50%.
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B
Off regular price for new customers. Upfront payment required $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for 12 month plan taxes and fees. Extra speeds may slow after 50 gigabytes per month when network is busy see terms. Okay, that's really interesting to understand what those linkages are and kind of why they're being investigated in that sort of way. And the fact of the kind of intensity of the interest in these investigations that you've hinted at there suggests that this was like not seen as that weird a thing to look into. Like this was, I don't know, maybe even scientific at this point. Is that correct or was this sort of a hidden weird, I'm going to look into it but I'm not going to tell anyone type thing?
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C
Yeah, no, it's more in the weird category in the, in the sense of, I mean there is another strand right through this period which is much more strictly scientific and medical and anatomical and evolutionary and I hope we'll come to talk about that. But the ethnographers, let's call them that, they called themselves often folklorists and in the 18th and 19th century, that's a term for people who are looking for. This is where, this is where it's, it's, it's kind of outside a scientific frame altogether. And it's more about fascinating cultures which don't have a written tradition. That's what the tradition of folkloric studies often refers to. And so it's, you know, these were one off people who by happenstance sometimes were, you know, perhaps often because they grew up around Roma families and they learned various Roman dialects and they become, they became incredibly talented multilinguists, fascinated. This is why it's in the so called weird category. You know, it's these kind of one off completely idiosyncratic people who spend sometimes their entire lives literally walking across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa looking for Roma communities and piecing together all kinds of different language, information, practice, information. So this is really in the idiosyncratic category not the scientific category, although, you know, really what these people are working at is these early, you know, they're really early cultural anthropologists. And it's from them that, you know, you know, quite a considerable lot of knowledge about Roman languages and Roman palmistry practices remain with us today.
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B
Yeah, no, that's helpful to understand kind of what that strand is. But as you said, there is also the sort of more scientific piece as well. So can we talk a bit about those sort of scientists and what they thought about this? I know, for example in the book there's anatomists involved, but what else have we got on that strand?
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C
Yes, so many. And in a way I, you know, when I was tracking back from poor dead Mox the gorilla's palm and thinking, what is this? I got lost for a while in the history of palmistry itself because I knew nothing about it. Completely fascinated me. And once I got my, a bit of a grip on that and I, you know, learned about medieval chiromancy and 6 15th and 16th century chiromancy, which I expected to be, I expected it all to be astrological and fingers of Jupiter and, you know, lines of Mars and so on and so forth. But in fact that came quite, quite late. But in the 15th and 16th century, all of these manuscripts and early chiromancy books that I was reading, most of them in that period were written by physicians. So one of the things that I learned, and I hope I've caught in the book, is not to think that going backwards in time we get more and more magical, so to say. But in fact quite the opposite. Going back in time, reading the hand, reading the body through this field of physiognomy, reading chiromancy books, they were written, what that is, is the history of medicine. They were more often written by physicians than any anyone else. And we have to understand that, you know, this is a world where doctors, most physicians would take an almanac with them, a rolled up scroll which would show the calendar, it would show them where the heavenly bodies were. They completely took it as ordinary, if complicated, that, you know, that the planet Jupiter and the finger of Jupiter might be connected. For us, this is a very strange idea. But what we need to understand and what is the challenge in writing a book like this is to make ordinary again those kinds of, those kinds of claims about, you know, about the body and health. It is all about the celestial bodies having a sympathy with and a connection to the individual body. So in a way, all of that early chiromancy and palmistry was already the history of medicine. But as I move forward into centuries, closer to our own 18th and 19th century, in a way, I had to do a bit of a regroup on what I was doing with this research that I just couldn't leave alone. And there was a book that I already knew of, which is very famous in the history of medicine. And it's called the Hand, simply the Hand. And it's by one of the 19th century's most eminent Anglophone anatomists, a man called Charles Bell. And he wrote a book in the 1830s called the Hand. And he wrote about the anatomy of the hand. Comparatively, how did the human hand compare with its skeletal structure, its nervous structure, even its skin, with all kinds of other mammals? And this is early comparative anatomy in a particular tradition. And when I kind of regrouped and I thought, okay, I've learned quite a bit about the history of chiromancy, but what about the larger history of the hand just as a piece of human anatomy? And I thought, oh, of course, Charles Bill, this famous anatomist, London based anatomist, wrote a book on the hand. And I did a kind of a regrouping and a kind of a rebooting of the project to think, okay, of course, the hand, including the lines on the hand, the folds of the skin, including, including those little tiny little papillary marks that make our fingerprints. Of course, this is part of the history of anatomy just like any other part of the human body. And that set me on another, another road to chase a more modern history of medicine and the Hand from Charles Bell onwards.
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B
So was this then, in those more recent times, a like, legal, popular medical practice.
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C
In, in a very specific sense. So as I tracked, you know, 19th century doctors, you know, it's a world and a set of strange set of people that I know quite well. I've been, you know, living with them in, in scholarly and historical terms, you know, for decades now. And the, the way in which it becomes absolutely technical is, that is through two lines. One is looking at, literally at the same palm creases, the palm lines that chiromancers or palmists would look at and still look at. But in the 19th century, there started to be correlations made between one, one line in the hand in particular and a set of intellectual disabilities. And the line, quite shamefully, actually came to be called the Simeon line. And it's what Palmas would call the head and heart line joined one line that goes all the way across human hands in about 2% of humans we understand, but in almost all Other primates, this one very identifiable line came to be called the simian line. And about 1880s, 1890s, and certainly by the beginning of the 20th century, people who worked in various institutions for intellectual, people with intellectual disabilities, most specifically people with what came to be called down syndrome, trisomy, there was much more of a correlation between their condition and this and this palm line. And this set a suite of doctors looking very closely at this correlation. And this is one line of very serious, clear what comes to be done as very difficult statistical work by the time we get in the 1930s, 40s, 50s. And the last chapter of the book moves us from, you know, we might think that reading palm lines is a completely idiosyncratic and edge and, you know, we might think of it as an entirely pseudoscientific thing. However, some. The last chapter of the book is on one of the most distinguished population geneticists of the mid 20th century. And his name is Lionel Penrose. And he spent his entire career working in and around and often with people with down syndrome, doing statistical work on this line as a, as a diagnostic tool for neonates with down syndrome. And he did that really from the 1930s right up to his death in 1972. And so it turns out, did the Paris based team who found the genetic cause of down syndrome. So they too had spent several decades looking at palms, lines in the palm. And so, you know, at that point I was able to put, once I found that out, that this is not fringe, this is absolutely core business for some of the most distinguished geneticists of the mid 20th century. Then I was able to think, oh, what are the strange connections? Is this part of one whole story about decoding the hand?
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B
I mean, there's so many elements to this, right? In addition to genetics, you in the book talk about phrenologists and biometrics and all sorts of things happening at this period in terms of measuring and comparing people that palmistry seems to be really quite central to, Is that right?
- [27:31]
C
Yes. And in a way, one of the things I learned to do was to open this up from palmistry to literally reading the hand. So rather than thinking, oh, oh, I'm writing a history of palmistry, the practice which is part of the book, I started to have a kind of more expansive understanding of what I was doing, which is how have all kinds of specialists, scientific lay and otherwise decoded the hand in a much larger, in a much larger sense. And so that's when I thought, oh, of course that almost every day when all of us open up our computers with our fingerprints. That's a measure, a biometric measure through which the hand, a part of the hand, the finger or the thumbprint is being decoded. And I, so I kind of open this up from thinking about just lines on the palm to thinking about how and which medical and scientific specialists are interested in fingers, in fingerprints in the front of the hand and the back of the hand. And that ended up being everybody from early endocrinologists to population geneticists doing various correlations, as I've said, and especially to the so called father of fingerprinting, the extraordinary Francis Galton. And so once I kind of, you know, turned that corner in my research and in, once I decided, oh yes, there is a really interesting book here to write to explain, Mock the gorilla's hand, so to say, backwards in time and forward in time. I then opened up my inquiry to think about the hand in much larger terms and for me it really was thinking about fingerprints that made me turn that corner.
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B
Well, is there anything you'd like to tell us more about that particular story?
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C
Well, thank you for the invitation. It's rather exciting for me because one of the things I've written about in the past many times actually is the history of eugenics. And the person who gave us that term, eugenics was a brilliant polymath by the name of Francis Galton through work he did in the 1880s and 1890s. And it just so happens that Francis Galton is also the person who, as I said, did the mathematical, very complicated mathematical and statistical work that showed us for the first time in the 1890s, a two things. A, that fingerprints don't change over a lifetime. They're the same at the beginning of life as they are at the end of life. And B, this stunning discovery through very, very complicated mathematics that everybody has a completely different set of fingerprints. And this really, it's something that we, we take for granted, I think. But what an extraordinary thing and what an extraordinary thing for this, this curious mathematician to, to do the work on. And I had known Francis Galton because I'd worked on eugenics for years and all of his papers are in miles and miles of boxes in University College London archives. And so I knew his papers, I knew him well, I knew his papers well, but I did, I had turned that corner. I thought of, you know, lots of people are talking about fingers are parts of the hand, fingerprints are part of the hand. What if I open up my, my research? And so of course I would go, I go to the person that I knew the best, the papers that I knew the best. And there, to my complete surprise, it was, the next great discovery for me was that amongst the literally thousands and thousands and thousands of fingerprints that Galtard had taken was the occasional palm print as well. So this man in the 1890s, who had done very complicated work on fingerprints, had also wondered about these other patterns and lines in that. In the hand, these other. What? This, this. He's interested in the shapes and the kind of geometry of the shapes and literally how are those patterns to be read. And it was a question for him that perhaps, perhaps there are correlations to be made and in individual diagnostics, so to say, to be made from the whole palm and not just the fingerprint. And this was something that Francis Galton, I had absolutely no idea, and I don't think anybody else did either, that Francis Galton, the father of fingerprinting, was also someone who was taking a lot of palm prints, including his own, and wondering actively about what he could learn from them. And what this turned into was a very strange field called dermatoglyphics, the study of glyphs, patterns or engravings in the skin derma of the hands and actually of the feet. And it's a field that was named in 1926 definitely after the work of Francis Galton, and I have never heard of it. Never heard of it. After nearly 30 years of being a historian of bodies and a historian of health and medicine, and I stumbled across this term dermatoglyphics. And it turns out to be also another strictly scientific field of inquiry that a lot of anatomists through the early to mid 20th century pursued. And in fact, listeners may be interested in, to plug it in to a Google search or a Google Scholar search, and you will see that still there's a suite of studies done in this field called dermatoglyphics, which was a strictly scientific study of the. The ridges in the hands and in the soles of the feet, and including lines in the hands and the soles of the feet. So it was another one of those moments, Miranda, where I thought, well, after decades of researching history of science and medicine, especially in the 19th, 20th century, here's an entire field that I'd never heard of. And it's the strangest thing. And what fun, I have to say, what a joy to research this book was, because researching the strange in the history of medicine is really what just pulls me back over and over again.
- [34:45]
B
Yeah, no, there's always so many things to investigate and go, oh, wait, what's around this corner, right. You know, what's in this archival folder, all that sort of stuff and finding fields that you had never even heard of is fascinating and also kind of raises these questions around sort of what has happened to these studies of palmistry. I mean, it sounds like in some ways they're kind of still going on the scientific side. Do we still have the sort of anthropological, occult aspect of it too? Like, is palmistry still a thing, whether by that name or any other?
- [35:18]
C
Oh, it's absolutely still a thing. And so in a way, in a way there are two objectives for me. One, one is to, to trace forward and backward in time palmistry. And another one was to trace forward and backward in time this more medical and scientific tradition. And both strangely are still with us. So, you know, we will all know that, you know, at the seaside and at the piers and parlors and fairs and festivals that, let's call them traditional palmists, highly skilled and much in demand, you know, that they are still practicing quite commonly in India and in China. This is not marginal at all. This is something that is practiced all the time. So yes, that line absolutely continues and that's interesting enough. But what is, I think, and the more I researched this book, the more I became enchanted by the story of how this lesser known field of hand reading and even palm read reading certainly continued in a strictly scientific and medical line. And so, you know, one is obviously the great significance of fingerprinting, but the other lesser known is, is the, it's absolutely the case that what is now called the four, sometimes the four finger crease or the transverse crease, what used to be called the simian line is correlated with down syndrome. And in fact several very high profile and very distinguished medical institutions will still give information around looking for the four finger crease or the transverse line, what used to be called the simian line, as, as diagnostic, instantly, easily diagnostic for down syndrome with neonates. So, so that's something that is absolutely on the public record as, as taught and recommended by certain institutions in medical, in medical training. And so, you know, there are kind of lines in this that became more, not less, strictly strictly medical and strictly scientific. And that's the kind of line of inquiry here that became most unexpected to me and most interesting to capture in this book.
- [38:08]
B
Yeah, no, that's definitely a very interesting intertwining. Thank you for sharing that with us. And obviously this book, as you've mentioned, had just so many reveals and surprises and unexpected things to discover and discover connections between so before we finish up our discussion on the book, is there any additional surprise or story that you want to make sure we include in our talk?
- [38:31]
C
Well, really, it's what we started with this, you know, huge figure in the history of astronomy and physics and science, Isaac Newton. And so it really is absolutely fascinating that we, to me, and I hope to readers of the book, that we know that as a young Cambridge student, Isaac Newton, the great astronomer and physicist, strolled across to the huge Stourbridge Common, which was held every summer in that in Cambridge. And we know that he bought a book called the Secrets Thereof Disclosed. And it was by an astrologer physician called Richard Saunders. And one of the things that fascinated me when I was able to go to Isaac Newton's own library and see just how many chiromancy books he was reading was that he himself was intertwining the history of science and the history of magic. That at this point we need to understand that the history of science has magic in it. And one of the things that Isaac Newton was interested in was a particular Jewish tradition of hand and body reading called Kabbalah, which still exists, Kabbalistic knowledge. And Isaac Newton was absolutely fascinated with that. And I also learned that Isaac Newton was fascinated with reading the hand because he's literally looking at lines. He's looking at a geometry on the hand. What are the triangles, what are the quadrangles, what are the angles of the line? And this tradition of what I call a geometry of the hand is also what got carried right through to those population geneticists in the 20th century. They're looking at hands, they're looking at patterns, and they're reading patterns and lines on the hands as very, very sophisticated mathematicians. And so, you know, I do think that Isaac Newton, for me, was a really key, a key figure precisely because this great figure in the history of science, I mean, is there a greater figure perhaps Darwin. Darwin is also in the book. He was also interested in Anne's. But that Newton himself really wove together what I've got in the subtitle of the book, A History of Science, Medicine and Magic.
- [41:11]
B
Well, that is a fabulous place, I think, to draw our discussion to a close. And it does leave me with just one final question, which I do tend to ask pretty much every author. But I admit, when a book has kind of such a high bar of curiosity and archival fun, it both seems like a harder question to answer, but also one I'm more intrigued to hear about because what could you possibly work on next like this sets such a high bar of research fun, I have to say.
- [41:40]
C
You know, this is a few, quite a few books in for me. And you know, each one just becomes, of course, it's absolutely fascinating and you know, research is just a, just such a wonderful thing to be able to do. But this book, because its beginning was so curious and it was just such an open box for me, the joy of researching this book really, I think, exceeded any any other. However, your your question really is what's next? And I'm I've been involved in a project on it's very different sunken continents and lost continents and mega continents, both mythical and real. And I'm just thinking about writing something on Atlantis and Gondwanaland, the real myth, the real mega continent and the continent that is entirely mythical but nobody's ever heard of, called Lemuria. So I'm just starting to cook up putting those three together, but in a way a little bit linked to this book because I love the borderland between strict science and mythology and that and the way in which those two things cross over and intertwine in ways that we often don't expect and have complete surprises. So although the Hand is a book that is about, you know, a part of the human body that's quite small and mega continents are extremely large, what links these two ideas, if I proceed with this next book, really, is that kind of borderland knowledge between science and not quite fiction, but other cosmologies?
- [43:35]
B
Well, that's definitely something that is in this book. So for any listeners who want to find out more, they can of course, read it titled Decoding the A History of Science, Medicine and Magic, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2025. Alison, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [43:52]
C
Thank you, Miranda. A real pleasure.