Custom makes laws harder to break than those of the land in which we
may happen to live. It frequently happens that these laws are founded
on experience, on mature judgment, on good sense, but occasionally
they are founded on old superstitions which in other forms have passed
away. Among the unfortunate customs that still linger is the habit of
crippling the left hand.
If a child in shaking hands offers the left, the horrified
mother or nurse at once corrects the blunder and apologizes for
it to the bystanders. She does not know why she does this beyond
the fact that “it is the custom”; she does not know that in
medieval times the right hand was the “dextrous” hand, the hand
of good faith, while the left was the “sinister” hand, the hand
of bad faith. We have crystallized these beliefs in our present
interpretation of these words; if we are “dextrous” we are doing
things in a right-handed way, while the mildest meaning given to
“sinister” is “unfortunate or awkward.” So the child is crippled
in its left hand to conform to a custom which has been discarded
and forgotten. (Text.)--_The Medical Times._
(3265)
See CUSTOM.