UNSW Special History Seminar: Decoding the Hand, Alison Bashford

Join us on 9 December as author Alison Bashford discusses her brand-new book 'Decoding the Hand’. This seminar will be followed by a Reception from 6pm at the Ritz Cinema Mezzanine in Randwick to celebrate the research achievements of the History and Area Studies group.

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 into the strange world of hand readers, revealing how signs on the hand—its shape, lines, marks, and patterns—have been elaborately decoded over the centuries. Sometimes learned, sometimes outrageously deceptive, sometimes earnest, and, more often than we ever expected, medically and scientifically trained, these palm readers of the past prove to be essential links in the human quest to peer into bodies, souls, minds, and selves. Not only for fortune-telling palmists were the future and the past, health, and character laid bare in the hand, but for other experts in bodies and minds as well: anatomists, psychiatrists, embryologists, primatologists, evolutionary biologists, geneticists, and more.

Alison will be joined in conversation by Professor Catharine Coleborne of the University of Newcastle.

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