ABSTRACT

This chapter brings touch as an entry point for an analysis of touch's social influences on medicine because touch is our most social sense'. It reviews the current relationship of touch to the epistemology of the body, focusing especially on how the body can be experienced through touch, and what this signifies. It considers a number of strands of spatial touch which some conceptual paradigms through which touch can be understood. The chapter brings together a number of ways of interpreting touch in medicine around the notion of biosubjective care. Biosubjective care emerges, therefore, as a multifaceted discipline since it involves the physical and the emotional, self and other, personal and professional, immutable and moveable, all of which need to be taken into account in the delivery or self-delivery of care. With touch, the spatiality of medicine is expressed internally as well as interacting with the degree and the intensity of physical relation.