The physiotherapist in clinical practice uses the hands, which professionally touch and are touched by the patient. This is a tactile dimension of medicine that calls for humanistic knowledge and understanding in the sense that, alongside the body as an ‘object’ and the disease as a phenomenon, the physiotherapist encounters a body that is a ‘person’ and a subject who is living his illness. Narrative-based medicine and the medical humanities represent the framework in which these reflections take place.