Touching the resurrection
One of the nurses on the wonderful PBS show “Call the Midwife” is Lucille Anderson, who came from Jamaica to serve the poor in London’s East End in the 1960s. She first arrived at Nonnatus House, the home and headquarters of the order of nuns and nurses among whom she would work, by walking for miles through a snowstorm after her train got stuck. She very quickly fell ill, her fever diagnosed not by a thermometer but by the compassionate touch of hand to forehead by one of the nuns. Lucille herself knows the power of touch. When racism rears its ugly head as she goes about her work, and her colleagues try to find the words to express their outrage and sorrow, Lucille reminds them that this is not the first time she has been rejected. There was a cost to her calling. Often, she said, white patients did not want her to touch them as if they were afraid that the black might rub off onto their own skin. Touch is such an intimate and powerful thing that some shrink
