Touch and Health

By -
In the book The Deepest Sense, Classen writes that medieval Europeans believed strongly in the power of touch. The touch of a saint, according to their conception, could heal the sick. A witch’s touch could cause someone to become ill. While perhaps most of us no longer worry that a women who is sleeping with the devil is going to poison us, we certainly recognize the power of touch in new ways.

The connection between health and touch has come up several times in this class now. After reading this most recent book, I can’t help but think back to A Natural History of the Senses, which recounted how important touch is in helping premature babies start to thrive. Apparently, a person doesn’t have to be a saint to heal someone with a touch; all they have to do is volunteer at a NICU. This is just one of the cases in which the sense of touch can help us heal. 


The discussion of touch and animals in The Deepest Sense reminded of something I had read about how pets lower children’s risk of developing asthma and allergies later in life. Being around something meant to be petted, it seems carries a whole host of health benefits. Just plug “pets lower the risk of…” into google and see the huge list of suggestions that pops up. Heart disease, Alzheimer’s, depression, asthma, cancer, stroke… the list is as endless as it is unbelievable. Apparently, our need to touch and be touched is so strong that our very lives can depend on it.

Living in such close proximity to other species animals completely by choice is something that humans are much more prone to than other species. There are other symbiotic relationships in nature, but these are often short-lived and rarely intentionally sought out. Humans, for some reason, actively seek out other species to live with. We love to feed them and we will pet almost anything. Perhaps natural selection has favored those with an instinct to find pets. We crave touch, and those who got pets were both healthier and happier. We evolved to pet animals. In a way, we did not domesticate them, but rather they domesticated us.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The most primitive sense

By -
Image
Smell the Flowers by Kirsten Star Smell, to me, is the most primitive sense. When most mammals are born, they immediately can recognize their mother’s smell and form an attachment to that smell. Mammals like puppies are almost entirely limited to only the sense of smell until they develop more of their other senses. The sense of smell also becomes the most primitive when considering humans and the phenomenon of perfume. For years, humans hunted certain animals for the purpose of obtaining the musk produced in the anal gland. This musk in small doses can act as an aphrodisiac when put into a perfume even though it has incredibly primitive origins. Though most of Western culture has an aversion to smells considered gross or undesirable, the wealthiest of women are still willing to pay heavy prices to spray a smell once obtained from the anal glands of other animals. The sense of smell is not something that humans can control and adjust but rather it is only changed by evolution over
Read more

Cannibalism and Symbolism

By -
Symbolism plays an important role in religious ceremonies because people cannot have the divine being where they want him all the time. So they start creating ways to be in touch with God. Such as in Christianity, eating bread is symbolized to be eating God-made flesh. There are similar rituals in Judaism where they eat the food of God. A big difference between taste and the other senses is that the object that is being sensed is internalized, whereas all the other senses use an external sensation. Taste cannot extend anywhere like the other senses can. This allows the humans to have no barrier between the divine (symbolized as food) and themselves. This is the closest they can get to God, but internalizing Him.  This thought of getting the closest they can to someone by ingesting and gaining power from it led my mind to wander to the thought of serial killers that also happen to be cannibals. I know that it might be a stretch, but there are some similarities. I als
Read more

Wrap-Up Post

By -
Image
Alright, let’s tie this up in a nice little bow. I genuinely did not know what to expect coming into this class. The extent of my knowledge of the senses comes from elementary school when we had to make it a little song to get the information through our tiny heads. Beyond that, everything seemed pretty cut and dry. We have five senses. We need to use all of them to survive. It’s as simple as that. I did not know how there was enough to talk about the senses to fill an entire college course, especially one specifically regarding the relationship between the senses and religion. But the fact that we were barely able to fit all the content in before the semester ended proves just how wrong I was. Let’s talk about why that is and what some of the things I learned were. First off, even the most basic assumption about the senses, that there are five of them, was questioned immediately. The sixth sense may not have been as clearly defined as the other senses, but there was certainly a lot to
Read more