Of Cornflakes And Emperors

Touch has a memory

~ Keats

Any good dictionary contains a multitude of little stories.  Take the word serendipity.  First coined in 1754 in a letter written by Horace Walpole after coming across a Persian fairy tale called The Three Princes of Serendip (the Urdu name for Sri Lanka) in which the heroes make a series of lucky discoveries. 

Other words emerge out of each other, branching off to give fresh meaning.  Deriving from old German the word whole gave rise to health which in turn has obvious affinities with heal, all important words.  Sometimes it feels essential that such words are in existence.  Having no negative connotations to speak of, they suggest respite, taking place away from life's treadmill, when time becomes incredibly precious. 

Healing has an end, a purpose and that is to become whole once again.  Human touch plays a vital role in this process of healing.  It reminds us like nothing else that we are rooted here and now on this Earth, in no other possible place or time. Such deep connectivity is one of the reasons massage has been used as a healing method for millennia. 

The Chinese first documented their findings in the Huang-di Nei'Jing (see our previous blog) which contains thirty different chapters on massage.  It has long been favoured by people at all levels of society.  Julius Caesar was said to have received daily sessions of "pinching" to treat his neuralgia and epilepsy.  Perhaps more bizarrely, in 1929 the inventor of the cornflake Dr John Harvey Kellogg published a book about massage and today people still cite him as one of the pioneers in that field.  Freud was supposed to have used massage to help patients suffering from hysteria and his friend and colleague Carl Jung once said that "often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain".

These are just a few random examples but they hint at how massage and the power of touch have been so valued down the centuries by givers and receivers alike.   You then only have to consider how central social grooming is for species of primates for example to see how close physical contact reinforces vital bonds.  It has the capacity to show you that something or someone else cares and you're not on your own.  And it is left to Keats to encapsulate the whole mystery in just four words.