Hands off

The orator, like the hysteric, is the anxious object of an abstracting gaze, made to perform his every natural affect and impulse according to a predetermined plot. At times, you can almost imagine that he revolts against this inhuman regimen, that he is madly signaling for assistance, or raises his arm at a random and rebellious angle, letting it drift along a dotted line of his own choosing, through the air's uncharted ways.

From A. M. Bacon, Manual of Gesture (1875).

The vexed history of gesture, from Cabinet magazine.