Decoding the Hand - Alison Bashford - diskuze

“Delightful.”—Times Literary Supplement • “Intriguing.”—The Sydney Morning Herald • “Fascinating, well-illustrated.”—Nature • “Altogether surprising and hard to categorise.”—London Review of Books • “There are many stories to be told here, and Bashford tells them well.”—Literary ReviewThe astonishing history of palmistry and biometrics—from occult physicians to the very foundations of modern science and medicine. 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 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 Alison Bashford takes us on a remarkable journey
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