What your hands say about you – according to history

Take a look at your hand, front and back. Now ask, what does it say about you? It's a question that, as a species, we've been asking for thousands of years. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Historian Alison Bashford joins Eleanor Evans to explore how the hand has been used to predict fates, diagnose illnesses, and even define identity, tracing the lines from ancient palmistry to modern medicine.

As we met this morning, we shook hands, and it struck me that there is so much history now behind this gesture for me in thinking about the hands. I don't think I've ever been so aware of my hands as I was reading a book as I was reading yours. We're going to delve in some of this really fascinating history today. And reading the body, reading the hands, is a practice that is thousands of years old. And your latest book chronicles this changing search for understanding that we might get from the hands.

I'd love to start by sharing with listeners what brought you to find this lens on history. I never thought I'd write a book on the history of the hand, and it's still I wake up sometimes and I'm surprised that I've done this. But I've also never enjoyed the research on a book so much, I don't think. Unexpected, and unexpected is always exciting. But this

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