musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

A touch of Nature


Sometimes I feel a little bit like the famous essayist Michel de Montaigne, when I write. Not with his skill or wisdom, I hasten to add, but more in his ability to readdress the same topics without embarrassment. It’s just that some things impress me again and again, and each time cry out for comment. Touch, for example.

I first wrote about its importance in medicine eight or nine years ago in the early days of recording my observations of the practice of my specialty.[i] By then, I had been an obstetrician/gynaecologist for well over thirty years, and was trying to analyse the things that I valued about touch. How to connect with patients and how to understand their concerns -and my own, for that matter- had likely evolved during that time. I began to realize just how important a role that touch -contact- had played in the interactions with my patients. I remembered many a patient remarking how much holding their hand had meant to them when I’d visited them after their surgery, or even just my touching their arm to congratulate them after delivering their baby. Touch is so important. But there are many things that we take for granted, aren’t there?

It’s interesting that for many of us, touch is such a common thing; at least before the pandemic restrictions it was often relegated to the background. And yet whatever we touch impinges on the body, unlike sight which is more like a movie, or a smell or sounds, which can similarly be sensed at a distance. Touch requires an intimate proximity that the other senses don’t. It may well be Touch that actually allows us to experience things: connect with them; indeed, touching a tree, or a stone, say, makes it more real to us…

I happened upon a truly epiphanous article the other day that made me realize just how important that sense is in our lives.[ii] Written by Nikita Arora, at the time a doctoral candidate in history of science, medicine and technology at Oxford, she began to think about the importance of feeling when she reached out to touch some moss on a log.

In touching, we are most vulnerable because we are always also being touched back. And yet, as she observes, moss is touch. It doesn’t poke the skin of the being it touches. And it takes practically nothing from the host it is in contact with.

Visual experience is less risky: it is at a distance; it isn’t required to look back -or even necessarily to notice our gaze. As Merleau-Ponty, a French philosopher, writes in his Phenomenology of Perception: ‘In visual experience, which pushes objectification further than does tactile experience, we can, at least at first sight, flatter ourselves that we constitute the world, because it presents us with a spectacle spread out before us at a distance, and gives us the illusion of being immediately present everywhere and being situated nowhere. Tactile experience, on the other hand, adheres to the surface of our body; we cannot unfold it before us, and it never quite becomes an object.’ And as he observes in another work of his (The Visible and the Invisible): ‘When my one hand touches the other, which one is doing the touching, and which one is being touched? We have eyelids; we can pinch our noses and shut our ears; but there are no natural skin-covers. We cannot turn off our sense of touch. To be a human in the world is to be tactile, to always be touching and touched with every single pore of our bodies.’ I like that…

And yet, the Covid pandemic stifled most of that for so long that guilt seemed to haunt every surface, and texture was just a dream, a bedtime story retrieved with difficulty from what seemed a distant past. I remember being so texture-hungry that I found myself running my fingers over the bark of trees, and caressing the hardness of wooden benches in the park to convince myself that the world out there was real. The touch was, if nothing else, somehow reassuring; social distancing didn’t apply to the grass under my feet, or the leaves that caressed my face on a forest trail. And when Covid restrictions were gradually eased (albeit inconsistently and begrudgingly in many areas) many of my friends were hesitant to accept the changes.

Maybe it was the restrictions drilled so harshly into us by our fear of contagion -or maybe some people simply didn’t like me- but now that touch is allowed again, I feel distressed, and perhaps even slighted if my proffered hand is ignored.

I longed for the days when hugging wasn’t illegal, and politesse required at least a token touch, as an acknowledge of meeting another in the wilderness of Time. In fact, I remember my first post-Covid handshake in well over a year, like I remember where I was when I heard the news of the 911 tragedy in the twin towers.

I was walking on a little trail through a nearby forest on a day when whatever sky managed to escape the curtain of branches was overcast, and a cool mist enveloped some of the taller trees. With a promise of rain in the forecast, I hadn’t expected to see anybody, but when I turned a corner where the path skirted an old cedar, I happened upon a couple walking slowly towards me -an elderly man walking with a woman I knew from the nearby village. The older man was still wearing his mask, but her mask was hanging limply around her neck.

“G,” she said, obviously pleased to see me in a different setting. “It’s so nice to see somebody braving the trail today.”

Maskless, I grinned and shrugged. “I talk to the trees,” I said, reaching for the old cedar and caressing it’s bark.

“You too, eh?” the old man said, pulling the mask off his face. “I touch ‘em too,” he added, reaching out a bony gnarled hand to stroke the trunk.

Debbie, seemed surprised he’d removed his mask, and  glanced at me, as if he was hopeless at following her advice. “Dad,” she said, “You promised…”

A mischievous smile appeared on his face. “I want the tree to know who, not just what, is greeting it.”

I must have looked surprised, because Debbie sighed and shook her head. “G, have you met my dad…?”

I smiled at her and shook my head.

Then, with a twinkle in his eye and a quick glance at Debbie, he proffered his hand for me to shake. “Edward,” he said.

So just like that, deep in a misty forest on April 11, I touched -no I grasped– my first hand in what seemed like years. And I lingered in that touch, as did he. When one hand touches another, which one is touching, and which is touched? Neither quite becomes an object…

[i] https://musingsonwomenshealth.com/2013/01/25/touch/

[ii] https://aeon.co/essays/a-history-of-botany-and-colonialism-touched-off-by-a-moss-bed

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