Big and Beautiful

If I were to choose my favorite organ of the human body, it would be the organ that encompasses all the others, it would be the one that covers us, protects from the hostile exterior world, and at the same time, acts as a huge, sensitive antenna that keeps us informed as to what it going on around us. Through it we feel the warm rays of the sun, the coolness of the rain and the freshness of the breezes. Furthermore, it gives man a beauty that distinguishes him from other living things. This organ is the external covering of the human anatomy, the skin.

How often we have admired the color, the texture, the softness, and the incomparable beauty of a new-born baby! How we have admired the exquisite beauty and feather-like softness of a mother’s breast, as the baby sucks the life-giving milk, and clutches the breast with its tiny fingers! What a variety of colors and hues the human skin has: the ebony skin of an African Black, the dark-blue skin of the Hindu, the silky skin of an Oriental and the rich color of a southern Mediterranean. How beautiful the peaches-and-cream cheeks of an adolescent girl! How beautiful the strong, tanned back of a laborer, sweating under a torrid summer sun!

There is even a kind of beauty in the skin of older people, because the wrinkles and folds are like pages in a book telling us about past life with its suffering and its love. Since our book is about love, let us not forget the beauty of a young person in love: the glow of the cheeks and a kind of delicious warmth that bathes the body as powerful and mysterious forces flow through it! How the face of a virgin flushes with crimson when excited by the touch of the man she loves!

The human skin, the biggest and the most wonderful of human organs deserves a special recognition, and our highest praise and admiration for the miraculous functions that it performs and the external and unique beauty that it gives to the human race. Other living things may be covered with scales, furs, or feathers, but the human skin, our exterior dress given to us by nature, is a thing of great beauty, a beauty surpassed only by the miraculous tasks it performs.

We salute the external limits of the human body, the external covering, the skin, with its multitude of colors, shades and textures, with its softness, toughness and elasticity. The skin is the glorious finish that nature has given the sculpture of the human anatomy!

   T. Steven Tegu, Ph.D.