The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture

THE HAND: HOW ITS USE SHAPES THE BRAIN, LANGUAGE, AND HUMAN CULTURE by Frank R. Wilson Pantheon Books, 1998 397 pages; $30.00

FRANK WILSON, A NEUROLOGIST WHO treats musicians' hand disorders, appends to this essay on matters manual a tribute to two forebears, the nineteenth-century Scottish anatomist Sir Charles Bell and the late John R. Napier, a comparative anatomist from England. One cannot explain consciousness or culture, Bell argued in his 1833 work The Hand, without understanding how the mind controls the hand and how the hand informs the mind. Napier's 1980 work, Hands, spun the same tale, but this time from a Darwinian perspective: hand-brain interaction, he argued, was a prime factor in the evolution of human intelligence.

Wilson's book is a companion volume to those master-works. It offers both a systematic review of the latest anthropological and neurophysiological findings about the hand, and an anecdotal...