1. A quarter of all the bones in your body are found in your two hands.
2. Your hand is built in 3 sections: fingers are called phalanges, long bones in the middle of your hand are called metacarpals, and the wrist bones are called carpals.
3. Your hand contains 27 major and minor bones in each hand.
4. There are 14 phalanges in the thumb and fingers.
5. The thumb has two bones.
6. Each of the other four fingers in each hand has 3 bones (phalanges); The distal phalanges (distal meaning further away from the body); the middle, a.k.a. medial phalanges; and the proximal phalanges (proximal meaning closest to the body).
7. There are 5 long bones, metatarsals, in each hand, that connect the fingers to the wrist
8. There are 8 wrist bones (carpals).
9. Your hands may also have numerous tiny sesamoid bones—which differ in number from person to person and appear in the hand’s tendons.
10. Each hand contains 29 major joints.

11. Each hand has at least 129 named ligaments.
12. The hand has 34 muscles that move the fingers and thumbs: 17 in the palm of the hand and 18 in the forearm.
13. We work our fingers by remote control…from our brain
14. The fingers are special, because there are no muscles inside the fingers. The muscles which bend the finger joints are located in the palm and up in the mid forearm, and are connected to the finger bones by tendons, which pull on and move the fingers like the strings of a marionette.
15. Each hand has 48 nerves: 3 major nerves, 24 named sensory branches and 21 named muscular branches.
16. Each hand has 30 named arteries and nearly as many smaller named branches.
17. Fingers are never perfectly straight.
18. The finger bones are relatively straight on the back side, but curved on the palm side.
19. The hand has five fingers.
20. Some babies are born with more than 5 fingers on a hand; the condition is called polydactyly or extra digits. There is no real explanation for this condition; however, it seems to be genetics and passed down through the mother’s line.

21. Black babies are 10 times more likely than White babies to be born polydactyly.
22. Some babies are born with webbed fingers called syndactyly. It is a fairly common congenital defect that runs in families, affecting boy babies more often than girls and affects Caucasians more often than Blacks or Asians.
23. White babies are four times more likely than Black babies to be born syndactyly.
24. The five fingers had unusual names in the past.
25. The Anglo-Saxons called the first finger scite or shooting finger; in Middle English it was called the toucher. In Middle English, the middle finger was known as the longman or long finger.
26. The Anglo-Saxons called the little finger, the “ear finger” because it was the one used to pick wax out of one’s ear. In Middle English, it was called the “little man.”
27. The ring finger was known in Middle English as the lec-man or leech finger. And had medical powers like the leech.  It was believed a nerve ran from the ring finger straight to the heart.  For the same reason, the Germans called that finger the Artrzfinger or Doctor’s Finger.
28. The Romans also called the ring finger the digitus medicinalis and it has a similar medical name in Greek, Japanese, Korean and Polish.
29. The muscles which power the fingers are strong—strong enough to help rock climbers support their entire weight at times by a few finger tips.
30. Fingernails grow about the same amount as the world’s continents move every year.

31. Fingernails take six months to grow from their root to the tip. A toenail takes two to three times longer.
32. The longest fingernail ever belonged to Shidhar Chillal. The nails were 20 feet, 2.25 inches and took 48 years to grow that long.
33. Structurally, fingernails are modified hairs.
34. All fingerprints are unique. They form during the first trimester in the womb where they establish their uniqueness.
35. Fingerprints help us get a grip on small things and enhance our sense of touch.
36. Fingerprints can disappear through careers like bricklaying and secretarial jobs where paper rubs the fingerprints smooth, and following cancer treatments.
37. Senior citizens have fingerprints that are difficult to capture because of the decreased elasticity of the skin. The ridges get thicker, the height between the top of the ridge and bottom of the furrow gets narrow and there is less prominence to read the fingerprint.
38. Our opposable thumb makes us unique in the animal world along with Orangutans, Gorillas, Chimpanzees, Old World Monkeys, Cebids, Koalas, Opossums, Troodon dinosaurs and the Plyllomedusa frogs in South America.
39. The fleshy bulb at the base of the thumb is the thenar from the Greek word for
40. Your thumb and fingers can work together, enabling you to do more complicated, sophisticated things with your hands than with your feet.

41. Nine individual muscles and three major hand nerves control the thumb.
42. The thumb moves in such a complex fashion there are six separate descriptive terms to describe the directions and movement.
43. Hand Surgery as a recognized surgical specialty did not exist until World War II.
44. 9% of all women are left-handed.
45. 6% of all men are left-handed.
46. More left-handed men than right-handed men like to tie their shoe laces in a double knot instead of a single knot.
47. Our hands are able to make two grips.
48. The Power Grip is the grip that grasps something, like a stick, and then uses the thumb to strengthen and direct it.
49. The Precision Grip is the grip formed by the thumb and finger pads to allow us to accurately throw something held between the thumb, index and middle finger.
50. One-fourth of all athletic injuries involve the hand and the wrist.

51. One-fourth of all disabling work injuries in the U.S. are hand and finger related.
52. When the hands are kept wet, the skin on the palm wrinkles.
53. If the nerve which supplies feeling on the palm is cut, it becomes numb and loses its ability to wrinkle and sweat.
54. The most common medical issues in the hand are arthritis, carpel tunnel syndrome, and Dupuytren’s contracture – also known as trigger finger.
55. About one fourth of the human brain that controls movement in the body is devoted to muscles in the hand.
56. If you can move your finger, it isn’t broken. False
57. Eating gelatin does not make fingernails stronger.
58. Cracking your knuckles does not give you arthritis.
59. Brachydactyly type D or BDD refers to a short thumb, wider than usual, with a wide short thumb nail. It has also been called royal thumb, potter’s thumb, stub thumb, trolls thumb, murderer’s thumb, bohemian thumb and dinosaur thumb.
60. The surface area of the skin of your fingers and thumbs, is larger than the surface area of the skin on all of the rest of your hand.

Some Quotations about Hands

61. You can’t shake hands with a clenched fist. Indira Gandhi
62. Hold a true friend with both hands. Nigerian Proverb
63. The impersonal hand of government can never replace the helping hand of a neighbor. Hubert H. Humphrey
64. Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in the power of your hands to do so. Proverbs 3:27
65. The best helping hand that you will ever receive is the one at the end of your own hand. Fred Dehner
66. The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but hold hands. Alexander Penney
67. Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven. Henry Ward Beecher
68. A man paints with his brains and not with his hands. Michelangelo Buonarroti
69. I was taught very early that I would have to depend entirely upon myself that my future lay in my own hands. Darius Ogden Mills
70. If you have not been served personally by caring hands in your life, do not be bitter, but instead, ask yourself who you can now serve. Bryant McGill