What Do We Mean By Healthy Soft Tissue?

What do we mean by healthy soft tissue? The soft tissue of the body has many qualities—different qualities in different parts of that tissue. But when we touch another human body, we have an instinctive sense that healthy soft tissue in adults is very similar to what a child’s body feels like in our hands. There are phrases in many languages, like in English we say “soft as a baby’s bottom,” to describe this quality—plush, luscious, juicy, alive. That baby’s bottom, thigh, cheeks, or arms—even as soft as they feel to us—also feel springy and resilient, with an evenly distributed sponginess.

In German, there’s a curious sounding word for that quality. “Knackig” suggests in that culture something biteable, a texture we want to sink our teeth into. In Italian, they might say “al dente,” which means “to the teeth,” to indicate something they want to bite or chew on. These words describe in those languages a tactile quality of healthy human tissue.

This is what we are seeking to feel in our work. I describe to students that I am feeling for tissue that is resilient, evenly distributed, and soft—not mushy, not sloppy or sluggish, but also not overly dense or tense. It’s the middle ground, the combination of qualities we associate with the youngest members of our species—babies and children. It’s a quality of tissue that feels desirable even when we are teenagers, fumbling around for our first erotic contact with others.

Responsiveness is a big part of what makes tissue healthy—the capacity to subtly change textures and states. As physicists say, all living tissue is soft matter, neither fully solid nor fully liquid. We work until all of the tissue under our hands begins to feel closer to healthy—not just on the outside, but all the way through to where it meets the hardness of the bones.