School of History and Philosophy of Science

RESEARCH SEMINAR

[The University of Sydney]

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Phenotypic Hands: Dermatoglyphics and Medical Genetics

Alison Bashford (UNSW)

Dates: Monday, 16/10/2023
Time: 5:30pm
Venue: Madsen Building (F09), Level 3, Room 331
How to register: Free, no registration required

Abstract: Late nineteenth-century readers of hands often claimed their work to 
be a medical and scientific palmistry; not a telling of the future, but a kind 
of diagnostics, a modern version of physiognomy. In this paper I explore how, 
and for whom, patterns on the hands came to be read by actual, not 
aspirational, scientists. The study of dermatoglyphics emerged in the light of 
Galton’s fingerprint correlation studies, but also in the light of a 
psychoanalytic tradition of how the body might speak through the hands. A 
geometry of ridges, lines, and patterns yielded information that the Galton 
Laboratory at UCL, led by mathematician Lionel Penrose, correlated with 
chromosomal abnormalities. Reading signs on the hand as phenotypes crossed into 
and drew from the domain of traditional palmistry.


Bio: Alison Bashford is Scientia Professor of History at UNSW, and Director of 
the Laureate Centre for History & Population. Her most recent monograph is An 
Intimate History of Evolution (Penguin) and edited book, New Earth Histories: 
Geo-cosmologies and the making of the modern world (Chicago). She is currently 
writing The Strange History of the Hand (Chicago), a long history of 
sign-reading from physiognomy to palmistry to genetics.



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