The future in your palm: science and The Secrets of the Hand

 For thousands of years, people believed their future could be read in the lines etched into the palm of their hands. The ancient art of palmistry, originating in India, claimed a close examination of the hand could not only reveal what kind of person you were, but also other information such as when you might die.

Like many other cosmological beliefs, it’s tempting to ask whether there might not be a kernel of truth to palmistry; that somehow the ancients intuited the workings of nature revealed today by the natural sciences.

This is certainly a temptation SBS documentary The Secrets of the Hand (part of its four-week Tales of the Unexpected season) has succumbed to. In a series of experiments, the program tests the notion that the hand might “speak to us” about our personalities, illnesses and even longevity.

Charles Bell and the hand of God

Since the 18th century movement in Europe known as the Enlightenment, the hand has been incredibly important for scientists. Take, for example, the celebrated surgeon and physiologist Sir Charles Bell (1772-1842).

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Scottish surgeon and anatomist Charles Bell (1772-1842). Granger/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Bell was not a scientific nobody. His experiments on the nerves opened the way for the modern understanding of the nervous system. He even has a facial palsy named after him.

For Bell, the hand was a particularly special part of the body. So much so that, in 1833, he made it the subject of a Bridgewater Treatise, a series of books written by some of the most eminent British scientists of the day, all of whom aimed to demonstrate that nature proved the existence of god.

In an exhaustive tome of more than 400 pages, Bell minutely described the anatomy of the hand, pointing out its incredible complexity, which could only have arisen if there was a designing god.

Bell’s beliefs were mocked by The Lancet, which cruelly aped his Scottish accent, saying that Bell:

never touches a phalanx and its flexor tendon, without exclaiming, with uplifted ye, and most reverentially-contracted mouth, ‘Gintilmin, behold the winderful eevidence of desin!’

Despite The Lancet’s disdain and the contemporary temptation to see Bell’s ideas as a direct antecedent to those of the intelligent design movement, his beliefs were mainstream for orthodox British scientists of the day.

Indeed, people like Bell did an incredible amount towards establishing the homology of the hand with the flippers of whales and the wings of birds. But Charles Darwin’s theories about evolution would soon purge such views from mainstream science.

Fingerprints… and medical palmistry?

Now the hand illustrated the complexities of evolution through natural selection. Equally significant, the minute grooves and ridges – the arches, whorls and lines – were a sign of the uniqueness of each person.