Medford mail tribune., March 31, 1963, Image 41

JuamJIy Weolcly J March St, 1963
Two of the most startling questions
about the human hand now under in
vestigation are: (1) Is the hand move
ment of a person with hidden cancer
markedly different from that of a
healthy person? (2) Is it possible for
a specially trained diagnostician to
"see" cancer in a person's handwriting
two to five years before a Bingle symp
tom of the disease appears?
Cancer diagnosis by a handwriting
test has been the life work of a virtual
ly unknown Viennese handwriting ex
pert name Alfred Kanfer, now a re
search associate at the Handwriting
Institute in New York City. A gentle,
soft-spoken, slightly built man, Kan
fer has been stubbornly fighting emi
nent skeptics over his graphoanalytic
diagnosis of cancer since 1932.
By 1935, a Viennese medical journal
had published a report on his analysis
of 600 cancer cases. In the series, he
was 80 percent successful in discrim
inating malignancies from noncancer
ous cases. Once, in a study he made at
an old-peoples' home in Vienna, he
was able to detect cancer 18 months
before surgeons found a tumor in the
patient; on another occasion he diag
nosed cancer four years before the
patient died of it
Hitler's persecutions forced Kanfer
to flee Europe. In New York, he had to
start all over again, and it was not
until 1949 that he interested the Hos
pital for' Joint Diseases in forming a
special committee for research on the -link
between handwriting and cancer.
The committee was headed by Dr.
Daniel Casten and worked under Dr.
Henry Jaffe's supervision. Initially,
correct diagnoses were made in about
80 percent of cancer cases but false
positives occurred in about one-quarter
of those examined.
It was only in ensuing years, with
additional cases and expert opinions,
that an important fact emerged. A
number of patient who had been clas
sified as "false positives" later turned
out to have cancer!
Dr. Casten recalls a woman of 63
who was discharged from the Hospital
for Joint Diseases in 1947 after treat
ment for a supposedly benign growth
in her left breast. Her signatures in
the handwriting test showed signs of
malignancy. But her case only added
to the distressingly large "false posi
tive" group until she was readmitted
in 1963 with unmistakable cancer in
the same breast. Dr. Casten says mild
ly, "That was the sort of case that
kept us going."
If the cancer centers now engaged
in studies of the Kanfer test report
favorably, strenuous efforts undoubt
edly will be made to perfect it. The
significance of a test for cancer that
merely requires a person to sign his
name to a slip of paper certainly would
be tremendous.
Even if proved valid, the test would
not tell doctors where the cancer is
located, however. It merely would alert
them to the fact that the disease is
present somewhere in the body in an
early stage. The problem then would
be to track it down while it still could
be treated surgically. '
Tho Hop an
Early-warning
Diagnosis
In comparison with the studies on
handwriting, the medical aspects of
palm reading or dermatoglyphics (ex
amination of lines on the palm) are
relatively recent. Palmistry's lineage
dates back to the earliest Chinese and
Greek civilizations, and its early his
tory is as disreputable as graphology's.
But in the 1960s, several groups of
scientists reported that they could cor
relate changes in the configuration of
certain lines in the palm of the hand
with Mongolism, a chromosome ab
normality damaging the brain. During
the development of the fetus, the palm
lines are determined at about the 13th
or 14th week after conception. They
result from variations in the thickness
of the skin tissues and their attach
ment to the muscles beneath. At Tulane
University, Dr. Harold Cummins, an
anatomy professor who pioneered in
the field of dermatoglyphics, reached
the point where he could recognize
Mongoloid retardation with 95 percent
accuracy by analysis of palms.
The complicated structure of the
heart is completed by the eighth week
of the infant's life in the womb. This
is close enough to the palm develop
ment so that a group of Tulane Uni
versity medical researchers wondered
whether factors that distort the heart's
delicate structure might also change
the lines in the hand.
r
The Probability
Hands May Become
Trustad Reflectors
of Health
Tulane's Dr. Alfred R. Hale and his
colleagues chose to examine the im
portant line of the palm which forms
an arc with a radius about 1 inches
from the base of the thumb. This line
forks to form what is known as the
axial triradius about an inch from the
juncture of hand and wrist.
Examining 157 patients with inborn
heart defects and 143 with heart con
ditions acquired in later life, the in
vestigators found that the single divi
sion of this line was the rule with
those whose hearts were normal at
birth. But in most of the patients
whose heart valves or chambers were
malformed at birth, the palm line
forked at one or two additional places.
Conceivably, inherited heart defects
may be pinpointed through palmistry
earlier, when remedial actions would
be more effective.
A fingerprint study at Ann Arbor,
Mich., still in its early stages, appears
to link schizophrenia with an inherited
vulnerability to mental illness.
Three medical researchers there
have discovered mental patients have
more abnormal whorls, arches, and
loops in their fingerprints than those
of "normal" prints on file at police
bureaus. The doctors believe that such
aberrations of fingerprints offer the
chance of advance detection of persons
susceptible to a number of illnesses
aside from schizophrenia.
In any case, with bread molds, In
dian snake roots, hypnosis, and other
supposedly "superstitious remedies"
well-established as medical tools, the
day of scientific hand diagnosis seems
finally to have come.
Family fntli, Marrk Jl , IMJ I