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We use our hands to explore the world around us; to manipulate and change it; to communicate; to signify aggression, submission or gratitude; to comfort or arouse; to make music, craft and create. We point, punch, tweak and text. We ball our fists, spread our palms, give someone the thumbs up and close our hands in prayer.

More than anything else, is it our hands which make us human?

In this series considers the human hand from five quite different angles: manipulation, creativity, gesture, communication and touch. In each programme we hear from people who have a very particular perspective on hands and the way we use them, including a dancer, a blacksmith, a massage therapist, a priest and the recipient of a hand transplant. Each of them takes a long look at their own hands, describes what they see and considers the relationship with the world which their hands give them.

As we encounter healing hands, steady hands, talking hands, holding hands and the laying-on of hands we come to understand just how much our hands identify and define us

The very word ‘manipulate’ has the image of the hand embedded in it and the first episode explores how we use them to organise, shape and change our world. We hear from consultant plastic surgeon Professor Simon Kay who leads the UK’s only hand transplant service at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. He considers the psychological aspects of hand injury and how much our identity and sense of ‘self’ is tied up in our hands.

We meet Tanya Shepherd who lost both her hands and one of arms to sepsis. In 2018 she became the first woman in the UK to receive a double hand transplant. She reflects on learning to touch and manipulate objects with a new pair of donor hands.

And Professor Tracy Kivell from the University of Kent takes a paleoanthropologist’s view, considering the evolution of an organ which has the strength to grip and wield heavy tools but which can also perform the finest, most delicate tasks – for example by Simon Kay in a surgical operation.

Producer: Jeremy Grange

Photograph courtesy of Tim Booth.

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