Touch and the Socially Dead

The premise of this short chapter revolves around St. Francis (Francesco di Pietro di Bernardone c.1181/82 – 1226) touching a leper: that is to put it simply, St. Francis briefly and physically engaged with someone who had Hansen’s Disease. The story’s central meaning is often taken to be that Francis treated the leper as a human being at a time when such individuals were generally deemed to be socially-dead (not part of normative society). Although Hansen’s Disease requires prolonged close physical contact to be contagious, it had long rendered the afflicted an effective outcast from everyday normative society due to fear of contagion by even the slightest contact. This was certainly the case in St. Francis’s time when sufferers were typically incarcerated in leprosaria and/or avoided.
Today, people who culturally could be deemed socially-dead would generally not include those suffering from Hansen’s Disease, but can include individuals confined to a residential or nursing home due to old-age and/or infirmity, people incarcerated in prisons for crimes they have been found guilty of, enslaved people, long-term hospital patients, and even severely disabled people and/or children in orphanages in parts of the world when these individuals are virtually abandoned. The socially-dead are individuals who are not physically dead but dead to wider society, unable to participate in everyday life in culturally-normative ways. There is of course socio-cultural and religious variability to whom can be classed socially-dead, especially in regard to specific diseases. One highly contextual disease is the HIV/AIDS virus which at one time in England (largely the geographical context for this chapter), as elsewhere in the world, was not only a death sentence physically, but a sentence of social-death if the infected person was socially-outed. Thankfully, in the UK and much of the industrial world, this is no longer the case with medical advances meaning those with HIV/AIDS, now have, on the whole, a life-long illness rather than a life-limiting one.
HIV/Aids is important to this paper; a paper which explores the significance of touch in connection with the socially-dead in two English contexts. Firstly, it explores Princess Diana (d.1997), who on April 19th 1987 was photographed shaking hands with a HIV/AIDS patient in a hospital, without her wearing protective gloves, at a time of “rampant” prejudice against HIV/AIDS sufferers. Secondly, it unpacks various issues surrounding the recent government mandated prohibition on touch in England for the socially-dead in hospitals and care-homes during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic (circa March 2020-February 2022).