Prof. Alison Bashford, 'Decoding the Hand: A History of Magic, Medicine and Science'

Tuesday 25 November 2025, 4.30pm

Summer Common Room, Magdalen College

In Decoding the Hand: A History of Magic, Medicine and Science, Alison Bashford explores the long connections between early modern chiromancy, nineteenth-century revivals of kabbalistic palmistry, sometimes reworked as ‘medical palmistry’, and a suite of twentieth century biomedical interventions, including the hand-based ‘dermatoglyphics’. 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. Part diagnostics, part prognostics as well as prognostication, she explains an enduring search for how our bodily surfaces might reveal an inner self—a soul, a character, an identity.

Alison Bashford FBA is Scientia Professor of History at University of New South Wales, previously Vere Harmsworth Professor at Cambridge. She is author of An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family (Allen Lane, 2022), winner of the Nib Literary Award, and shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize. Her most recent edited book is New Earth Histories: Geo-cosmologies and the Making of the Modern World (Chicago) with Kern and Bobbette. In 2021, she received the Dan David Prize for her contributions to the history of medicine.

This event, open to all, is supported by the TORCH Network 'Divination, Oracles, and Omens', the Calleva Research Centre at Magdalen College, and the Centre for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology in the History Faculty.

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