The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge's show exploring the power of tactility was planned long before the pandemic but could not be more timely

Of all the senses, the one we take most for granted is touch. Sight, hearing, smell and taste – all have their arts except touch (unless you count massage). Touch is the Cinderella of the senses, consigned to fifth place in Aristotle’s sensory hierarchy and kept there by medieval Christian moralists who blamed it for inflaming sexual desire. Touch was bestial, reducing human beings to the level of animals.

It was Pliny in his Natural History who noted that “among the senses, that of touch in man ranks before all other species”. No ­animal is as touch-sensitive as Homo sapiens, the furless mammal whose wraparound sense organ, the skin, has been revealed by modern neuroscience to be a complex mass of highly adapted sense receptors – concentrated especially in the hand, with six nerve fibres to each pinhead-sized point on the fingertips.

If touch tempts human beings to sin, one might reasonably ask why God cursed humanity with such a sophisticated mechanism? Aquinas was one medieval philosopher who departed from Aristotle, arguing that touch was basic to human survival and hence the most important sense of all. It was in any case hard to reconcile contempt for the tactile sense with a religion founded on the idea of Incarnation, and as the practice of dissection advanced medical knowledge of anatomy, the extraordinary complexity of the human hand began to be taken as proof of intelligent design. The sense of touch was rehabilitated. Now modern science has confirmed its centrality to human experience with evidence that it is the first sense to develop in the womb and that skin-to-skin contact, releasing the “love hormone” oxytocin, is crucial to childhood development and adult well-being.