Charlotte Wolf

But do hands also hold signs of the past? Do they have a history? Over decades of research as a historian of medicine and of human bodies, I'd never imagined such a niche question, and then it was sparked in an instant between one second and the next in the time it takes to open a manila folder.

For another project altogether, I was in the UK to research the papers of Charlotte Wolf, a physician trained in Berlin in the nineteen twenties and living in London in the late nineteen thirties, a Jewish refugee.

Opening a file labeled Zoo 1938, I came across a massive, delicate palm print.

It belonged to Mock, a lowland gorilla at London Zoo.

Two days after Mock's death, the keeper had granted Wolf special permission to enter the morgue and collect a pattern that had been too dangerous to acquire in life.

Mock's palm print was both forceful and touching.

Indeed, I was tempted to literally touch, to hold hands across time, across species, and across the worlds of the living and the dead.

The emotive power was unmistakable.