Secrets Disclosed: Reading the Hand from Chiromancy to Genetics

Secrets Disclosed: Reading the Hand from Chiromancy to Genetics

In 1838 Charles Darwin climbed into the orangutan’s cage in London Zoo. His observations would turn into his study of the expression of emotions in man and animal. One hundred years later, 1938, a German Jewish psychoanalyst climbed into the same cages, not to read primate faces, but to read their palms.

In this lecture, Alison Bashford explores the strange and surprising medical and scientific history of the palm and the hand. From early modern “chiromancy” to genetic studies of the so-called “simian line,” decoding the hand has unfolded as medical sign-reading, bodily semiotics.

Image credit: Richard Saunders, Palmistry, the secrets thereof disclosed…(London, 1663). Plate prepared for L.S. Penrose, “Finger-prints, palms and chromosomes,” Nature (1963)

Speaker:

Alison Bashford is Scientia Professor in History and Director of the Laureate Centre for History & Population at UNSW Sydney. She also directs the New Earth Histories Research Program. Her work connects the history of science, global history, and environmental history into new assessments of the modern world, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Her most recent book is An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family (Random House, 2022), winner of the Nib Literary Prize, an Economist Best Book of 2022, and shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize, 2023. Before taking up her Research Chair at UNSW, Alison Bashford was the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. She is Fellow of the British Academy and of the Australian Academy of Humanities. Secrets Disclosed: The Hand from Chiromancy to Genetics is her next book (Chicago, 2025).

The Dyason Lecture is the signature annual event of the Australasian Association for the History Philosophy and Social Studies of Science (AAHPSSS). It is named in honour of Diana 'Ding' Dyason, foundation President of AAHPSSS and Head of the History and Philosophy Department at the University of Melbourne between 1958 and 1974. Previous Dyason Lectures can be seen here.

Enquiries: shaps-events-admin@unimelb.edu.au