Touch is a sensation, a sense that can carry with it a vast sea of emotional experience. It is the way in which we experience the world, we experience ourselves as a body, we experience our environment through our body and we experience other people. Holding a hand is a simple, yet also beautifully complex human way of connecting to another person. Feeling your own hand in another’s and knowing they similarly feel your hand in their hand is a way of sharing physical experience and is a gateway to understanding emotional experience. Empathy is enabled by the acknowledgement of our shared humanity; we are bodies, we are minds, we are souls, we have personalities, we feel emotions and physical sensations. We learn about ourselves through others. Touch can be warm, grounding and convey a sense of belonging. Having your hand held can affirm your physical existence whilst opening the possibility that you can share something of your physicality, beyond your own existence, with another person; a handhold is shared.

The medical examination always starts with the hands. The body boundary is surpassed and both humans feel the hand, the touch of the other. This simple connection conveys care, and ultimately indiscriminate love for a fellow human. Personality differences, class, gender, race, whichever dividing factor someone could pinpoint, all these layers fall away with the simplicity of touch and the task at hand can flourish, the shared goal of healing.