Yet she is proud of her murderer’s thumbs.īenham, William George. Shrimal describes to perfection the thumbs of my daughter, who to the best of my knowledge has never killed in a fit of passion and years ago became a vegetarian out of compassion for the suffering of animals. They have no control over themselves, and are liable to go to any extreme of violence or crime during one of their tempers.” Fortunately, says Cheiro, the owner of such a thumb cannot “plan out or premeditate a crime, for he would not have the determined Will or power of reason to think it out.”Īs recently as 2011, in the book Practical Palmistry, Narayan Dutt Shrimal claims to have read the palms of 400 killers and “discovered that all had one common sign on their hands, that the murderer’s thumb was small and the tip of the thumb was flat, also that the nail of the thumb was small and more or less round in shape.” Nine years later, the palmist Cheiro (a pseudonym of Louis Hamon) writes of people with murderer’s thumb: “If they are opposed they fly into ungovernable passions and blind rages. Their brutal instincts being strong, jealousy most often has led them to fits of violent rage, and the terrible qualities of the clubbed thumb have given them passion and determination strong enough to take human life.” In his 1901 manual The Laws of Scientific Hand Reading, William George Benham warns that clubbed thumbs are “dangerous companions…not to be trifled with at any time.” He further declares that “any murderers have had clubbed thumbs…. Palm readers brought the term “murderer’s thumb” into the mainstream. In later decades, practitioners of palmistry took up the cause against BDD with even greater enthusiasm. Writers of popular detective novels sometimes scattered their stories with suspects with BDD to hint at criminal inclinations. The nineteenth-century European and American passion for categorizing racial groups and personal character through physical manifestations - physiognomy, craniometry, and phrenology are among these pseudo-scientific fields - branded the BDD thumb as a mark of primitive disposition, a sign of impulsive and unsophisticated thinking. In past centuries, though, the condition acquired a sinister reputation.
Some people, especially parents, find it cute. It’s an inherited trait that graces the thumbs of women more often than men.īDD is completely harmless and even provides unexpected benefits in keyboard typing, video gaming, piano playing, and thumb-war battling. It’s not terribly rare, appearing in around 0.4 percent of the population in the U.S., and in slightly higher frequencies in some other parts of the world. Murderer’s thumb - also called shovel thumb, toe thumb, Dutch thumb, hammer thumb, stub thumb, and potter’s thumb - goes by the medical appellation brachydactyly type D (BDD).
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