HANDWRITING AND HEALTH

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 57, 29 November 1924, Page 18

HANDWRITING AND HEALTH

A DEMAND FOR SCIENTIFIC RECOGNITION. Graphology is engaging the particular attention of German savants just now (says the London “Observer’s” Berlin correspondent). It has been called a “pseudo-science” so often that very few people in a land of exact sciences are inclined to take it seriouslr. Of late, however, two pleas for its official recognition have been made, by a doctor in a University clinic and |bv the (handwriting expert attached‘to one of the criminal courts -of Berlin. ■ , . , This last, Herr 0. Goerthein, does not hesitate to. state roundly that, apart from legal questions of forged signatures and the like, he has very often been able to tell a man’s character from his writing, and helped many a vexed case along to a satisfactory end by his conviction of who was the delinquent and who was not. The University professor claims that the writing of a patient is a help in the diagnosis of disease, and urges that a special course in graphology be given to medical post-graduates. This does not apply to merely nervous diseases where a trembling of the hand may betray incipient paralysis, but to handwriting in general as a test of good health, compared before and after the symptoms that led to a visit to the doctor appeared. It is probably owing to the publicity given to news of this kind that big German firms are now employing graphologists to pick out a likely applicant from the many hundred replies tea “situation vacant.” It is said that the uniformity of carefully studied formulae in business correspondence is so great that word-for-word comparisons may be made, and the smart office boy who is the potential chief be picked from scores of the unambitious, the lazy, and the absolutely undesirable. the graphologists qf Germany have just been holding a congress, and hope that the “pseudo-science” will be raised to the ranks of a University chair attached to the medical faculty before long.