Abstract
IN the “Notes” of NATURE of March 12 you mention an association proposing to teach writing with both hands by the method of upright penmanship. This is quite intelligible, but when it is said that the child by this means will acquire left-handed skill in all other manipulations, this cannot be correct. Left-handedness means that the left hand can be used equally well with the right; this is true, but not in the same way. The course of the cricket ball in a left-handed bowler is not the usual one. When a surgeon is left-handed it is not to enable him to do with his left exactly the same thing as with the right, but something different. After making an incision in the eye with his right hand, he takes the knife in his left to complete what he requires, without altering his position or turning the patient round. A left-handed waiter, after removing the limbs of the chicken on one side, changes the knife and fork to the other hands, and does the same on the other side. It only wants a moment's consideration to see that if the arms are turned round one goes in the right direction and the other in the left, so that if the right hand is used in turning a screw to the right, as screws are all made, a corresponding movement with the left would turn it in the opposite direction. As left-handed screws are not usually made, a left-handed man has to use a different and inferior set of muscles, and works with a disadvantage. In the same way ordinary handwriting cannot be copied by the corresponding muscular and nerve apparatus on the left side; it is done by a totally different apparatus after much time and trouble. It is much easier to use the corresponding set of muscles, but then this produces backward or mirror writing. The only movements common to the two sides must be near the median line. If the corresponding muscular and nerve apparatus be used in both arms, the result is equally good, but if is not the same, as in writing or turning a screw. If one hand imitates the exact movements of the other, it is done by another apparatus and at a disadvantage, as with a child learning the scale and using different fingers for similar notes. There is, therefore, no such thing as ambidexterity, unless, indeed, it is used in another sense, as in the violin player, where he educates each hand for its own particular object.
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WILKS, S. Ambidexterity. Nature 67, 462 (1903). https://doi.org/10.1038/067462b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/067462b0
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