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Jane Doe
Ms. Chew
ENG 305
1 October 2011
A Gentle Hand: The Use and Effects of Touch in Nursing
Touch and the way it affects me personally is something I have overlooked on a day-to-
day basis. I did not realize how many times a day I open my arms wide to greet my friends with
a hug or how many times I am introduced to people and extend my arm to shake their hands. I
am sure that I am not the only one who tends to overlook that aspect of life. Touch occurs when
someone is trying to communicate with other people, and it occurs when giving personal care,
whether to yourself or someone else. Touch occurs when trying to assist someone, and it even
occurs accidentally. I am a nursing major, and I am interested in the profound effects of touch in
the healing process; I know that touch will play a large part of my duties as a nurse and will help
to define the relationships I develop with my patients. Although my personal interest in the topic
has been strong from the beginning of this process, my early research has strengthened my
interest even more and has helped me narrow my focus from the broad topic of touch deprivation
to the more specific issues of the use, effects, and experiences of touch in the field of nursing.
My research on touch deprivation started when I read the book A Saint on Death Row by
Thomas Cahill. This book is now serving as my primary source. The main subject of the book,
Dominique Green, was placed on death row, and Cahill vividly illustrates the physical and
psychological effects that touch deprivation had on him. One of the other young men in the book
personally speaks about how his senses were elevated when, after being held in isolation in a
room with no windows, he stepped outside to go to the visitation room. Those who are not in
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solitary confinement or just even separated from the outside for a long period of time will not
share the same experience because exposure to the outside has not been taken from them. I
cannot personally relate to this young mans experience because I am exposed to the outdoors
daily. However, I can understand his experience and empathize with him because of Cahills
descriptive details. Although there were not many obvious health-related issues in A Saint on
Death Row, this one intrigued me, and I ran with it. I am exceedingly interested in this topic
because it will not just affect me in my future career, but it also affects everyone in some way or
another.
Initially, I planned to illustrate the negative effects of touch deprivation, but I soon found
that my topic was too vague. Touch deprivation can stretch from minimal effects to very
extreme effects with different people of various age groups, and they could not all be effectively
discussed in the space I will have for my final paper; therefore, I decided to narrow my topic. I
then planned to do therapeutic touch versus physical touch and explain how they differ, but I also
found that topic to be a bit too subjective; some of the sources that I found argued that
therapeutic touch is no different from physical touch, and technically, that is true. I was
struggling because all of the topics I came up with were too broad to be effectively covered in
under ten pages. Eventually, I came across a journal article that helped me solidify my topic for
my actual research paper as the use, the effect, and the experience of touch in the nursing field.
In the article Physical Touch in Nursing Studies, Pirkko Routasalo notes that Nursing studies
have addressed these three main areas of physical touch (846); this interaction occurs between
nurses and patients of all ages.
Apart from this journal article, I have found many other relevant articles in medical
journals, most notably the Journal of Advanced Nursing. I am having better luck with journal
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articles than I am with books, and I feel this is because of the currency of the articles; the study
of the importance of touch is a relatively new concept in nursing, so there have not yet been
many books written about it. However, I have found a couple of good books to serve as
supplementary to my primary source of A Saint on Death Row. One book that I have on order
with interlibrary loan is called A Call to Nursing: Nurses' Stories about Challenge and
Commitment, and it provides the personal stories of many different nurses. I have not yet been
able to read the whole book, but I believe that the importance of touch will shine through some
of their stories. I hope to use this and all of my other sources to effectively argue for the
importance of touch to all humans and to specifically illustrate the use, effects, and experiences
of touch in the field of nursing.

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Annotated Bibliography
Cahill, Thomas. A Saint on Death Row. New York: Doubleday, 2009. Print.
Thomas Cahills 2009 book A Saint on Death Row tells the tragic story of Dominique
Green, who was convicted of murder for a crime committed when he was eighteen years old,
held on death row in and out of solitary confinement for twelve years, and eventually executed at
the age of thirty. Throughout the book, Cahill emphasizes not only the problem of the possibility
that Green was wrongly convicted but also the extreme, cruel, and inhumane conditions he and
his fellow inmatesguilty or innocentfaced during their torturous years on Texas death row.
I trust Cahill not only because of the honest way in which he tells Greens story but also because
he went out of his way to help Green in any way he could, which illustrates his personal
investment of time, energy, and emotion in these issues. One of the qualities of this source that I
do not like is that Cahill often takes a religious approach to the issues of touch deprivation and
other experiences of death row inmates. I am taking more of a medical and professional rather
than a religious approach to the issues, so the portions of the book in which Cahill discusses
religion will be useless to me. Overall, though, A Saint on Death Row provides me with personal
and extremely vivid descriptions of the effects of touch deprivation, and I will use Greens story
to illustrate the profound impact that positive touch experiences can have on those who are
suffering.
A Call to Nursing: Nurses Stories about Challenge and Commitment. Ed. Paula Sergi and
Geraldine Gorman. New York: Kaplan, 2009. Print.
A Call to Nursing: Nurses Stories about Challenge and Commitment, edited by Paula
Sergi and Geraldine Gorman, is a collection of personal stories told by nurses. Remarkably,
there are fifty-three short stories in this book, and each is told by a different nurse. While the
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amount of differing perspectives can provide me with plenty of variety in my discussion of
individual experiences, the negative aspect to this broad selection of material is that none of
these stories are very detailed or go into very much depth; this discrepancy just means that I will
need to find another source to fill in any holes that I feel are left by the nurses who authored
these selections. I really like the pairing of Sergi and Gorman as co-editors because each of them
brings something different to the process. Sergi is a poet and creative writer who publishes and
teaches writing at the college level, and Gorman has a PhD in nursing and an MA in English
literature. Together, Sergi and Gorman cover both the fields of nursing and writing, creating a
winning combination of expertise and an entertaining and informative collection. While the
selections in this book do not focus exclusively on the effects of touch in the field of nursing, I
know that I will be able to use these nurses personal accounts to understand and explain the
relationships between nurses and their patients. I will then be able to illustrate the importance of
touch in the development of those relationships.
Routasalo, Pirkko. Physical Touch in Nursing Studies. Journal of Advanced Nursing 30.4
(1999): 843-850. Print.
Pirkko Routasalos article Physical Touch in Nursing Studies is actually a review of
many other publications regarding touch in nursing. Routasalo begins by explaining the two
main types of touch in nursing (physical touch and therapeutic touch); the distinction he makes is
that while it is true that physical touch may be experienced as therapeutic, that is not its explicit
purpose in the same way as with therapeutic touch. Most of the touch studies reviewed in this
article are from the USA, Canada, and the United Kingdom, so the representation of touch in
nursing is limited to the culture of modern western society. I had not considered the broadness
of my topic before reading this article, and Routasalos focus helped me decide that I want to
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narrow my topic in the same way, so I will be focusing on the role of touch in the nursing
practices of America only. One drawback to this source is that because it is a review of many
different articles written by many different people, the results and claims often contradict each
other. I will still have to determine which opinions best support my own ideas and filter out all
of those that dont.