Passage Two
1) In the semi-darkened room, a light focuses on a hand, its palm facing up and held in two other hands. A pair of intent eyes is gazing at the palm, and a calm, low voice is saying:
2) “It’ s all written here in your hand. You are destined to die young, unless certain things happen. ”
3) This sounds like the conversations held every day in gypsy tearooms, but the voice belongs to a doctor. He continues:
4) “The signs indicate that you were born with a heart condition. We must perform additional tests. If they confirm what I see here, you will need surgery. Then your fate will change, and you may live a long life. ”
5) Such predictions, read from a palm, are destined to become commonplace as medical scientists learn more about the telltale signs written by nature. Scientific palm reading might even put Gypsies and other traditional practitioners of palmistry out of business.
6) Palm reading, or chiromancy, is based on a system of reading the lines in the palm. The long line circling the base of the thumb is called the life line. The longer it is, the longer you are supposed to live. The first crease below the fingers and running nearly the width of the hand is called the heart line. The longer it is, the more personal warmth you are supposed to have. The long crease between the life and heart lines is the head line. It is supposed to reveal how intelligent you are.
7) Fortunetellers pin tales of your life—past, present, and future—round these lines. Although their stories are built on a shaky framework of imagination and coincidence, there is some truth in them. It is on this partial truth that the new science of palmistry is being built.
8) The association of palm prints, and fingerprints too, with health and disease is not as farfetched as it may seem. A scientist might have written what a prophet of occult (超然的) palmistry, Henry Frith, did. Frith claimed that the lines in the hands do not appear by accident. Rather, each mark or line means something, and any deviations from the “normal” are significant. It is now known, for example, that a single rather than the usual double crease under the fingers is one of the signs of the mongoloid form of mental retardation. This sign helps doctors make the diagnosis in newborn infants suspected of having this condition.
9) Scientists are also turning to palm reading and fingerprint patterns for clues in diagnosing illnesses. After studying the palms and fingerprints of 287 patients, Drs. Alfred R. Hale, John H. Phillips, and George E. Burch learned something important. They found they could tell which patients were born with heart murmurs and which had developed murmurs as a result of disease, such as rheumatic fever.
10) In 1964 a Spanish doctor went even further. He wrote in the British Medical Journal that fingerprints reveal which kinds of heart disease a patient was born with, whether the heart valves are at fault, and if so, which valves are responsible. He also stated that these patterns tell if there are defects in the aorta, if there is a hole in the wall separating the chambers of the heart, and even where the hole is!
11) Perhaps what palmists call the life line should be renamed the heart line. Certain fingerprint patterns in combination with the appearance of the life line are now examined to differentiate between heart patients born with certain conditions and those whose conditions developed later in life. In patients with congenital heart conditions, a fingerprint characteristic, known as the delta—where lines form a triangle—tells the story. Instead of appearing on the heel of the hand, where it should be, the delta appears on the life line. The delta patterns on the hands of those who developed heart conditions after birth are quite different.
12) The first scientist to study and classify finger patterning was an Englishman, Sir Francis Galton. He defined the patterns as arches, loops, and whorls. An arch has not delta; a loop has one delta; and a whorl has two deltas. Men usually have more whorls and women more arches.
13) Look closely at your own finger and palm patterns under a strong light. You will see how the thin lines arrange themselves into arches, loops, and whorls. Now look at the base of each finger. You will see lines forming deltas there too. Harder to find is a delta halfway down the palm and just off center, and another in the heel of the hand.
14) According to another scientist, Professor L. S. Penrose, any disturbance in growth before birth will show up in the development of the hand’ s patterns of lines and creases. In the case of mongolism, the palm has only one crease across it. Also, the delta near the center of the palm is higher than normal.
15) Other diseases have their own patterns. Patients with Wilson’ s disease, a liver-brain disorder, are likely to have whorls on the index and third fingers and their thumbs. People with one type of nerve tumor have an unusual pattern called the “central pocket loop” on the third and small fingers of their left hands. Other patterns suggest diseases of the glands and one form of cerebral palsy, as well as many other diseases.
16) Recently a researcher at U. S. mental hospital linked fingerprints and palm prints to mental illness. Dr. Theophile Raphael studied the prints of one hundred patients being treated of or schizophrenia, a form of mental illness. He found distinct differences between their prints and the prints of healthy people. The schizophrenics had more whorls but fewer larger loops.
17) Raphael’ s findings support the theory that people are born with inherited weaknesses for certain diseases and that fingerprint and palm print patterns can be clues to such weaknesses. Eventually doctors may be able to look at a baby’ s palm and tell if he is prone to mental or nervous illnesses, various heart ailments, cancer, and many other diseases. Perhaps the day is coming when palm reading will be done by your doctor as routinely as he now takes your pulse.