A lot of what, and who, we think we are as individuals and social beings is concentrated in our hands. When teaching the rhetorical trope of synecdoche to undergraduates, I always use the expression ‘give me a hand’ to illustrate the difference between figurative language and simple truth-telling. In Decoding the Hand, Alison Bashford is alive to the multiplicity of meanings held by these extremities. There are many stories to be told here, and Bashford tells them well.

For her, there is a link between the Victorian passion for medicine and the equally powerful 19th-century love of the exotic occult, particularly the figure of the wandering ‘gipsy’ (Bashford retains the term and its antiquated spelling ‘to signal a historical usage’) romantically connected with palmistry. As soon as the Roma people had been drawn into a supposed relationship with Egypt, exoticism and Orientalism ran amok. Palmistry became believable as a lost science, although many who praised its efficacy warned that not every practitioner was authentic. The result was a revised and revived palmistry that offered itself as a true and learned magic, connected – inevitably – to Kabbalah and other syncretist occult movements. Bashford suggests that leading theosophists of the time were seen as new philosophers of the body. The idea of the astral body gained traction, and palmistry became a method of seeing clearly what was happening beneath the skin. As that happened, a link was forged to phrenology, the unattractive and typically racist science of reading behaviour and capability from small facial signs. Phrenology links to a fascination with parts of the hand as aspects of the mind, and from there it is a small step to believing that our inner feelings might express themselves – be imprinted – on the surface of the body.

The ability of blind people to read through touch alone, and of the deaf to hear using their hands, drew attention to both the hand’s power and its ability to communicate. But legitimate observation and study often found themselves outflanked by pseudoscience. At the turn of the century, two men