We might expect chiromancy in the modern period to be analysed best within the well-known late nineteenth-century occult revival. The specific practice of palmistry, as it happens, is minimally examined in that historiographical context. Yet the purpose here is not to reinstate palmistry into our already extensive understanding of an Anglo-American modern occult, but to show how other readers of hands, including those trained in biomedical sciences, exceeded occultism altogether, and often enough repudiated it. This article considers modern palmistry in the first instance through an intellectual and social historiography of mind–body knowledges and practices. It shows not only how various ‘psychic’ practices turned into ‘psy’ practices, but also how reading signs of the hand morphed into clinical diagnostics, into primatology, comparative anatomy and eventually into early medical genetics, especially through the so-called ‘simian line’ correlated with Down syndrome. Through analysis of a suite of London-based hand experts, this twentieth-century history of palm-reading argues for a plain ‘disenchantment’ of chiromancy, qualifying historians’ common commitment to theses of re-enchantment. One strand of palm-reading’s recent past turns out to be part of the history of scientific naturalism, not super-naturalism at all.

中文翻译：

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手相术的祛魅：从手相术到遗传学解读现代手

我们可能期望现代时期的手相术能够在著名的十九世纪末神秘主义复兴中得到最好的分析。碰巧，手相术的具体实践在史学背景下得到了最少的研究。然而，这里的目的并不是要让手相学重新融入我们对英美现代神秘学的广泛理解中，而是要展示其他手相读者，包括那些接受过生物医学科学训练的人，是如何完全超越神秘学的，并且常常否定它。本文首先通过身心知识和实践的知识和社会史学来探讨现代手相术。它不仅展示了各种“通灵”实践如何转变为“通灵”实践，还展示了解读手部迹象如何演变为临床诊断、灵长类动物学、比较解剖学，并最终进入早期医学遗传学，特别是通过与唐氏综合症相关的所谓“猿系”。通过对伦敦手相专家的分析，这部二十世纪的看手相史论证了手相术的简单“祛魅”，证明了历史学家对重新着魔论的共同承诺。事实证明，最近一段时间的看手相是科学自然主义历史的一部分，而不是超自然主义历史的一部分。