Our eloquent hands

The article explores the historical connection between palmistry—the practice of reading palms for character or future predictions—and medicine.

Palmistry, often dismissed as occult or pseudoscience today, was once a respected medical tool.

For example, the simian line (a single crease across the palm) was used in diagnosing Down’s syndrome (trisomy 21) until the 1950s.

This line appears in up to 5% of humans and is also found in some primates, like gorillas.

Historian of medicine Charlotte Wolff studied palm prints of both humans and animals in the 1930s, including a gorilla named Mok, highlighting how palmistry blurred the lines between medicine and mysticism.