ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Dermatoglyphics in the Twentieth Century

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

English Abstract

US anatomist Harold Cummins named ‘dermatoglyphics’ in 1926. The study of the patterns and ridges in palms and soles, it methodologically extended Galtonian fingerprint analysis. This anthropometry of hands and feet looked backwards, in many ways, to nineteenth-century questions and methods. Yet analysis of dermatoglyphic publications across several citation platforms reveals the enduring usage of dermatoglyphics throughout the twentieth and into the twenty first century. Indeed, the field reached a high point in the mid 1960s to 1970s—the years of the International Biological Program—driven by medical genetics on the one hand, and population genetics on the other. Far from fading away however, dermatoglyphics gained renewed interest in the mid 1990s. That an anatomical method of inheritance studies would reach a high point after the molecularization of genetics is perhaps unexpected. That the method would begin re-ascending during the genomic era, is surprising. This paper investigates the plurality of dermatoglyphics across a century to explain why use of this seemingly antiquated anthropometric method persisted. It traces who conducted the research, to what effect.

Author

• Michelle Bootcov, University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia