How to Sell a Dissertation, Or: The Hand as a Proxy for the Brain

Guest post by Tabea Cornel, recipient of the 2017 Mary Louise Nickerson Award in Neuro History. Tabea Cornel is a PhD student in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation focuses on handedness research within the brain and mind sciences in Europe and North America, particularly theories of the origin, prevalence, and pathological nature of left-handedness.

When asked about my dissertation topic as an early ABD (“all but dissertation”), I used to tell people that I work on the history of handedness research. A very common response was: “Handedness in what sense? Does it have something to do with molecules?” I usually explained that I’m researching manual preference, and that my project has nothing to do with chirality or any other fancy physical phenomenon.

After half a year of explaining what I mean by “handedness,” I came up with a more efficient strategy for answering the dissertation question. I started waving my hands in the air whenever I said “handedness.” This was somewhat effective. My conversation partners usually understood that I write a history of left- and right-handedness, but this also made them give me a look that said: “Oh my, what a boring thing to do.”

Having learned my lesson from these encounters, I now introduce the underlying argument of my research before I mention the actual topic. The extended version of my elevator pitch goes somewhat like this: My project investigates scientific classifications of human subpopulations. I particularly attend to the ways in which traditions, stereotypes, and social inequities inform research in the human sciences and the extent to which these conceptions produce “scientific” explanations for alleged human hierarchies.

Enter handedness: The lens through which I look at the phenomenon of hierarchical classifications is manual preference. This may seem an unexpected route to take, but research on handedness is a very fruitful avenue for tracing continuities within the human sciences in the past 150 years. More precisely, the project paints a picture of the longue durée of the mind, brain, and neuro-sciences. Since French anatomist and anthropologist P. Paul Broca (1824–1880) declared in 1865 that humans are right-handed because they are left-brained, researchers have used handedness as a proxy for the brain, mind, and character. On both sides of the Atlantic, scientists have linked anatomical, genetic, or hormonal explanations of the causes of handedness with age-old racist, sexist, and able-ist ideas of what makes one group of humans different from another one.

This framing gets many of my conversation partners (almost) as excited about my work as I am.

Several items at the Osler Library illustrate the distinct status of the hand even before 1865, when Broca advanced his theories about the connection between brain asymmetry and manual laterality. Scottish anatomist and neurologist Charles Bell’s (1774–1842) The Hand, for instance, provided a vivid portrait of the hand as an exclusively human organ. He wrote:

We ought to define the hand as belonging exclusively to man—corresponding in sensibility and motion with that ingenuity which converts the being who is the weakest in natural defence [sic], to the ruler over animate and inanimate nature.[1]

Bell was very clear about this instance of human exceptionality in the quoted edition from 1833. But for the 1865 edition, the publisher added a drawing on the page following this paragraph. It shows a monkey that is reaching for something outside of the image, probably a branch of a tree or a piece of fruit. Only in case it had not become entirely clear in the text, this drawing empowered the reader to visually grasp the difference between their own hand and the allegedly primitive paws of an ape.[2]

After having explained the system of bones, muscles, nerves, and blood vessels in intricate detail, Bell concluded that the hand, or the human body more generally, could not have developed accidentally. Bell clearly believed in a hierarchical divine creation, a “Great Chain of Being,” with white male humans all the way at the top.[3]

Bell’s faith in a purposeful design of the human species also underlay his argument that the superiority of the human hand derived not from its anatomical condition, but from its close association with the human intellect:

In discussing this subject of the progressive improvement of organized beings, it is affirmed that the last created of all, man, is not superior in organization to the others, and that if deprived of intellectual power he is inferior to the brutes. … Man is superior in organization to the brutes,—superior in strength—in that constitutional property which enables him to fulfil his destinies by extending his race in every climate, and living on every variety of nutriment. Gather together the most powerful brutes, from the artic [sic] circle or torrid zone, to some central point—they will die, diseases will be generated, and will destroy them. With respect to the superiority of man being in his mind, and not merely in the provisions of his body, it is no doubt true;—but as we proceed, we shall find how the Hand supplies all instruments, and by its correspondence with the intellect gives him universal dominion.[4]

A further drawing was added to the 1865 edition in the interest of enforcing said hierarchies amongst different human groups even more. The reader looks at a scantily dressed dark-skinned male with a dagger hanging from his neck. This person is crawling on the floor under a white male’s bed and reaches for valuables on the night stand.[5]

The fact that the aforementioned monkey and the apparent thief reach for something with their left hands implicitly reiterates the inferiority of these two creatures. Other illustrations in the 1865 volume present right-handed actions, no matter if they display the function of bones and muscles or more complete (parts of) light-skinned humans.

Because of the presumed close association between the hand and the mind, the moral valency of actions of the hand implied a hierarchy of individual beings and groups of beings. The idea of the “Great Chain of Being” is mirrored in the grasping of the left monkey paw, the attempted theft of the black left hand, and all other ostensibly decent and accomplished uses of white right hands shown in further illustrations in the volume.

The English physiologist and anatomist George M. Humphry (1820–1896) echoed the close association between the mind and the hand in his treatise on The Human Foot and the Human Hand. He insisted that “The Hand [Is] the Organ of the Will” and that “the hand becomes an organ of expression and an index of character” because the mind works through the hand.[6]

Other sources at the Osler Library bear witness of much more heterodox approaches to the mind as a window into human character. Take the 78-page monograph The Hand Phrenologically Considered. The anonymous author provided a manual for how to perform a phrenological reading of a person’s hands to determine their character, abilities, and experiences. (The traditional phrenological approach would have been to palpate an individual’s skull.)

In line with my argument that practitioners used the hand to advance theories about the character, mind, and brain of human subpopulations, the author of The Hand Phrenologically Considered suggested that the “Form of Extremities Differs in Individuals of the Same Species” by age, sex, race, class, and ethnicity.[7]

In a similar vein, the Carter Medicine Company employed the promise of phrenological assessments of the hand in the interest of financial gain. In a little pamphlet, Mysteries of Our Hands and Faces, Carter Medicine provided instructions for the phrenological reading of hands as well as parts of the face (forehead, eyes, nose, etc.). The Company offered these instructions in conjunction with directions for how to use their liver pills most effectively.

Even more eclectic is a little hand-shaped advertisement for the Worcester Salt Company. Under the slogan “Your fortune is in your own hands,” the pamphlet offered a short introduction into palmistry to all potential buyers of Worcester Salt.[8] The advertisement makes intelligible the wide-spread fascination for heterodox sciences that connected the mind and the hand in the late 19th century, decades after Broca had advanced his anatomical theory.

Other examples of holdings at the Osler Library that put the hand into the focus of human classification practices abound. The French poet Joseph L.J. Leclercq (1865–1901), for instance, published a historically-oriented work about palmistry. Concretely, he provided examples for and distinguished between “[c]hirologie, chirographie[,] chirognonomie,” “chiroscopie, chirosophie, palmisophie, [and] chiropsie.”[9] Who knew that there were so many different approaches to turning the hand into a proxy for the mind?

Last but not least, I want to mention Hungarian writer Pál Tábori’s (1908–1974) much more recent monograph The Book of the Hand. Tábori, who had a deep interest in psychical phenomena, connected in his work palmistry with idioms and superstitions about the hand, as well as with considerations of manual gestures, the sense of touch, dactyloscopy (the reading of fingerprints), handwriting and graphology, and the condition of having lost a hand and/or using an artificial hand.[10]

Tábori’s work intrigues by its sheer breadth of hand-related phenomena, some of which we would consider apt research topics for establishment science, and others that are clearly heterodox. As I learned during my four weeks at the Osler Library, the desire to access the hidden brain through the manifest hand brought these approaches together.


[1] Charles Bell, The Hand: Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments, as Evincing Design, Bridgewater Treatises on the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation 4 (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1833), 26.

[2] Charles Bell, The Hand: Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments, as Evincing Design, 7th ed., Bridgewater Treatises on the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation 4 (London: Bell & Daldy, 1865), 13.

[3] Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009).

[4] Bell, The Hand, 39–40.

[5] Bell, The Hand, 29.

[6] George Murray Humphry, The Human Foot and the Human Hand (Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., 1861), 156–61.

[7] N.N., The Hand Phrenologically Considered: Being a Glimpse at the Relation of the Mind with the Organisation of the Body (London: Chapman and Hall, 1848), 51–57.

[8] Worcester Salt Company, “How to Read the Lines of the Hand” (New York, 1894).

[9] Joseph Louis Julien Leclercq, Le caractère et la main: Histoire et documents (Paris: F. Juven, [1900]), 1–2.

[10] Pál Tábori, The Book of the Hand: A Compendium of Fact and Legend Since the Dawn of History (Philadelphia: Chilton Company, 1962).

Research Awards & Travel Grants 2018

Are you a historian, physician, graduate or post-doctoral student interested in conducting research at the Osler Library? Do you know that the Osler Library gives out awards and travel grants to local and international researchers each year? We are currently accepting applications for the following:

  • Dr. Edward H. Bensley Osler Library Research Travel Grant – Awarded to those whose project requires traveling to Montreal to consult material in the Osler Library. Each year up to $4000 in awards will be made available to one or more individuals who require a minimum of 2 weeks to carry out their research. This research must fall within the calendar year in which the grant is awarded. Applications for the 2018 grant must be received by December 31, 2017.
  • Mary Louise Nickerson Award in Neuro History – Awarded to one or more scholars who are interested in carrying out research utilizing the Neuro History Archival and Artifact Collections – the centre-piece of which is the Penfield Archive in the Osler Library – and other available resources at the Osler Library, the Montreal Neurological Institute, and the McGill University Archives. Applications for the 2018 award must be received by December 31, 2017.

Additional information on terms, requirements, how to apply, previous winners, and general information about the library can be found here. We welcome all further enquiries at osler.library@mcgill.ca or 514-398-4475, ext. 09873.

Feel free to share this notice with your own networks, listservs, and social media outlets to help us spread the word about these fantastic opportunities!

Research Awards & Travel Grants 2017

Are you a historian, physician, graduate or post-doctoral student interested in conducting research at the Osler Library? Do you know that the Osler Library gives out awards and travel grants to local and international researchers each year? We are currently accepting applications for the following:

  • Dr. Edward H. Bensley Osler Library Research Travel Grant – Awarded to those whose project requires traveling to Montreal to consult material in the Osler Library. Each year up to $4000 in awards will be made available to one or more individuals who require a minimum of 2 weeks to carry out their research. This research must fall within the calendar year in which the grant is awarded. Applications for the 2017 grant must be received by December 31, 2016.
  • Mary Louise Nickerson Award in Neuro History – Awarded to one or more scholars who are interested in carrying out research utilizing the Neuro History Archival and Artifact Collections – the centre-piece of which is the Penfield Archive in the Osler Library – and other available resources at the Osler Library, the Montreal Neurological Institute, and the McGill University Archives. Applications for the 2017 award must be received by December 31, 2016.

picmonkey-collageAdditional information on terms, requirements, how to apply, previous winners, and general information about the library can be found here. We welcome all further enquiries at osler.library@mcgill.ca or 514-398-4475, ext. 09873.

Feel free to share this notice with your own networks, listservs, and social media outlets to help us spread the word about these fantastic opportunities!

Upcoming talk: Charms in late medieval English medicine

We are pleased to announce that one of our Edward H. Bensley Osler Library Research Travel Grant winners, Dr. Elma Brenner, will be speaking at the library on Wednesday, 20 January. Dr. Brenner, subject specialist in medieval and early modern medicine at the Wellcome Library in London, will give the talk “Combating Danger: Charms in Late Medieval English Medicine.

5:00 PM, Wellcome Camera of the Osler Library of the History of Medicine. This talk is presented by McGill Medievalists.

Brenner Poster

Accepting applications: Dr. Edward H. Bensley Osler Library Research Travel Grant

The Osler Library of the History of Medicine of McGill University offers a travel grant designed to assist researchers who need to travel and establish temporary residence in Montreal in order to use the resources of the Library.  The Library has the largest collection of rare and secondary material in medical history in Canada, including medieval and modern manuscripts, archives of such notables as Sir William Osler, Wilder Penfield, Norman Bethune, and Maude Abbott, medical ephemera, and 2,500 medical prints. Monographic, serials, and ephemera holdings are listed in the McGill Library Catalogue. The Dr. Edward H. Bensley Osler Library Research Travel Grant is available to historians, physicians, graduate and post-doctoral students, and those interested in the arts and humanities of medical history whose project requires them to travel to Montreal to consult material in the Osler Library. Each year up to $4,000 in awards will be made to one or more individuals who require a minimum of 2 weeks to carry out their research in the calendar year in which the grant is awarded.

To apply, please fill out the form located on our website. Applications for research to be carried out during the 2016 calendar year should be received by December 31, 2015. The applications are considered by a committee which gives preference to specific and clearly described projects.


The Osler Library Research Travel Grant is endowed through the generosity of graduates of the Class of Medicine of 1936, and a $100,000 gift from the Pope-Jackson Fund.  The grant recognises Dr. E.H. Bensley’s place in the history of the library. A former dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Dr. Bensley’s later life was devoted to the history of medicine. He was affiliated with the Department of the History of Medicine (fore-runner of the present Department of Social Studies of Medicine) and taught the history of medicine to second year medical students. He also edited the Osler Library Newsletter and wrote extensively. His last book, “McGill Medical Luminaries,” was the first title to appear in the Osler Library Studies in the History of Medicine series. He was named Honourary Osler Librarian in 1979.

 

Announcing the Edward H. Bensley Research Travel Grant recipients

Dr. Edward H. Bensley (1906-1995)

Dr. Edward H. Bensley (1906-1995)

The Osler Library is pleased to announce that we have selected three researchers out of a very worthy pool of applicants to receive this year’s Dr. Edward H. Bensley Research Travel Grants to support their work at the Osler Library. This year’s recipients are Dr. Sasha Mullally, Dr. Elma Brenner, and Emily Lockhart.

Dr. Mullally is a professor of history at the University of New Brunswick. She holds a doctorate in history from the University of Toronto and is a specialist in the social history of medicine and health in Canada and the US. She is currently co-investigator on a study of the history of medical diasporas in Canada, a SSHRC- and AMS/Hannah Foundation-funded research project. Her work at the Osler Library will investigate the history of physicians immigrating to Canada in the second half of the 20th century.

Dr. Brenner works at at the Wellcome Library in London as a specialist in medieval and early modern medicine. She was previously a post-doctoral research fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, where she also earned a Licence in Medieval Studies. She holds a doctorate in history from the University of Cambridge and has published on the history of leprosy in the Middle Ages. At Osler she will be looking at a number of early printed works on the “French Disease,” a disfiguring illness roughly equivalent to modern-day syphilis.

Emily Lockhart is Toronto-based photographer, designer, and curator. As a travel grant recipient, she will continue her work on a historical photographic project with McGill’s School of Architecture. The project explores the spaces of medical instruction at McGill in the wake of World War I and today by reproducing a collection of 146 glass plate negatives taken by McGill medical student James R. Lockhart (1890-1980) after the war and rephotographing the places that appear in the historic photographs as they now exist.

Congratulations to all of our 2015 recipients!

The Dr. Edward H. Bensley Research Travel Grant is endowed through generous gifts from the McGill Medicine Class of 1936 and the Pope-Jackson Fund. The grant honours Dr. E. H. Bensley’s place in the history of the Osler Library, as a former dean of the Faculty of Medicine at McGill who devoted the latter part of his life to the study of the history of medicine. For more information about the research travel grant, please see our website.

Pivnicki Award

Applications are currently being accepted for this research travel grant to the Osler Library

The Dr. Dimitrije Pivnicki Award in Neuro-History is offered by the Osler Library and the Montreal Neurological Institute and Library to support research in the field of neuropsychiatry and neuro-history. The award was established in 2012 by the family and friends of Dr. Pivnicki (1918-2007), who practiced and taught psychiatry at the Allen Memorial Institute of McGill University from 1956 to 1996. With degrees in law and medicine, he had a wide and eclectic interest in classic and modern languages and literature, and a keen appreciation of the history of neuropsychiatry, an area of scholarship that will be advanced by this award.
The award supports a student or scholar wishing to carry out research utilizing the rich archival and monographic holdings at McGill University, such as the Penfield Archive in the Osler Library, and other resources available at the Osler Library, the Montreal Neurological Institute and the McGill University Archives. The Osler Library’s collections are listed in the McGill Library Catalogue and the Osler Library Archives Collection website.

Terms: The value varies depending on the project, to a maximum of approximately $4,000. The recipient is required to carry out research in Montreal during the 2014-15 fiscal year (May 2014-April 2015). The award may be renewable.

Requirements: We invite applications from a variety of individuals, including graduate students, scholars and professionals. Recipients are required to submit a report of their work suitable for publication in the Osler Library Newsletter and may be requested to give a brief presentation at the university.

Deadline is February 1, 2014. Information on how to apply is found on our website.

 

Researcher profile: Justin Rivest

We recently had the pleasure of welcoming PhD candidate Justin Rivest as an Osler Library Travel Grant recipient. Justin grew up on a farm in southwestern Ontario and did his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at Carleton University. His MA is in History (Early Modern Europe) and he is currently a PhD candidate at the Institute for the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins. Here’s what he had to say about his recent trip to the Osler Library.

Title-page of Albumasar’s De magnis conjunctionibus . Bibliotheca Osleriana 1760.

Title-page of Albumasar’s De magnis conjunctionibus. Bibliotheca Osleriana 1760.

My work at the library grew out of my MA thesis, which was a study of French almanacs and prognostications from the 1490s-1550s and led me to an interest in the links between astrology and medicine. While my dissertation has come to focus on a different topic (proprietary remedies in seventeenth century France), Renaissance astrology has remained a persistent research interest. I’d been looking for an opportunity to spend some time with a good collection of Renaissance astrological texts, with the goal of better understanding how almanacs and prognostications were produced. I was pleased to find good collection of early printed astrological treatises at the library, including a copy of the Ephemerides Magistri Johannis de Monte Regio, a series of celestial ephemerides for the period 1492-1506 produced by the 15th century German mathematician Regiomontanus, which was probably the most interesting and useful thing I was looking at during my visit. Ephemerides were one of the most important tools available to Renaissance astrologers, furnishing the raw data and tables of planetary movement needed to create astrological charts, birth horoscopes, or annual prognostications of the general conditions in the coming year, such as are found in almanacs.

Modern day readers might typically associate almanacs with farmers and weather, but early modern almanacs were often produced by learned physicians and contained important medical information. The positions of celestial bodies and the moon were understood to affect the human body. While a birth horoscope could tell a physician about an individual patient’s humoral complexion, medical almanacs gave doctors and barber-surgeons general information for tabulating propitious days for therapeutic interventions such as bloodletting. For example, a common piece of advice was never to let blood from a part of the body if the moon was in its associated sign, e.g. Aries for the head or Pisces for the feet. This medical information would be placed alongside other things such as the dates of new and full moons, feast days, etc. that we would normally associate with a calendar. Almanacs of this type were initially circulated in manuscript form, but the advent of print vastly expanded the audience for almanacs and provided increasing numbers of astrologers with the astronomical resources (like Regiomontanus’ ephemerides) needed to produce them.

Depiction of Saturn from Albumasar’s Flores astrologiae. B.O. 7410.

Depiction of Saturn from Albumasar’s Flores astrologiae. B.O. 7410.

By the end of the fifteenth century, almanacs were drawing on data about the planets and signs of the zodiac to predict everything from warfare to drought and plague, based on sets of associations drawn from natural philosophy. The five known planets and the twelve signs, for instance, were associated with the four qualities of hot, cold, wet, and dry, the four elements, the four humours, the four seasons, and even the classes of society. Saturn, for example, was associated with the rich, religious men, farmers, and the old, so the state of Saturn in the heavens could affect their conditions on earth.

As for what led me to this topic: in general I’m fascinated by the medieval and Renaissance view of an integrated cosmos, designed by a provident creator to be full of associations and sympathies. The associational framework of astrology, with its harmonies between the heavens, the elements, and the human body, strikes me as one of the most beautiful manifestations of this view of the cosmos.

Read more about Justin’s work in the latest issue of the Osler Library Newsletter and stay tuned for another upcoming entry on Renaissance astrological tables.

 

 

Applications accepted for the Osler Library Research Travel Grant

We are currently accepting applications for our research travel grant. The Osler Library Research Travel Grant is endowed through the generosity of graduates of the Class of Medicine of 1936, and is supported by the Faculty of Medicine of McGill University. It is designed to assist scholars who would like to travel to and establish temporary residence in Montreal in order to use the resources of the library.

The grant is available to historians, physicians and those interested in the arts and humanities of medical history. It carries an award of $1,500 (Canadian) and must be held from 2-4 weeks during the calendar year of 2014. $2,000 will be made available to those requiring 4 weeks to complete their research.

Applications for the 2014 grant must be received by December 31, 2013.  Candidates will be informed of the results early in 2014. Please find the application form on our website.