We are excited to welcome Alison Bashford to Blackwell’s where she will be discussing her latest book, Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic.

Alison will be in conversation with Ana Carden-Coyne, Research Explorer The University of Manchester.

Doors: 6.30pm, Starts: 6.45pm

Tickets are £4 or free when buying a Book & Ticket option or a copy of the book in store.

About the book:

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?

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. Drawing telling parallels between the divination promised by palmistry and the appeal to self-knowledge offered by modern genetic testing, Decoding the Hand also makes clear that palm-reading is far from a relic or simple charlatanism. Bashford’s sagacious history of human hands touching and connecting opens wide the essential human pursuit of what lies within and beyond.

About the author:

Historian and writer, Alison Bashford is Laureate Fellow and Scientia Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. She is Director of the Laureate Centre for History & Population and founding co-Director of the New Earth Histories Research Program.