ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Physiometry: Contesting the Arts of Bodily Measurement from Phrenology to Dermatoglyphics

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Medicine depends on reading the body’s surface for clues about internal states, bodily temperaments, and even mental abilities. In recent centuries, that ‘reading’ has ever more involved practices of measurement, quantifying, and counting. This panel brings together the plural worlds of anthropometry, craniometry, hand reading, and dermatoglyphics, in the British Empire, since the early nineteenth century. These perspectives are heterogeneous, some central to the growing epistemic authority of clinical statistics, for example, while others move seamlessly from seances to sell-all cures, and back to the asylum, as Alison Bashford has recently shown in Decoding the Hand (Chicago, 2025). By taking a broad disciplinary range, our panel reveals the arts of measurement as being far from a steady march towards the rule of numbers, but instead constantly contested.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Alison Bashford, University of New South Wales

Commentator

• Alison Bashford, University of New South Wales

Individual Presentations

• The Arts of Measurement in George Combe’s Correspondence - Richard Oosterhoff, University of Edinburgh

• Craniometry and the Construction of Anti-Popular Racial Science in Victorian Britain - Elise Smith, University of Warwick

• Dermatoglyphics in the Twentieth Century - Michelle Bootcov, University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia

Session Organizers

• Rene Winkler

• Richard Oosterhoff, University of Edinburgh