![]() ![]() 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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