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(More customer reviews)Twenty years before starting to write this book, Duffin, a hematologist, was "invited to read a set of bone marrow samples....The fourteen specimens were taken from one woman over an eighteen-month period" (p 3), a woman suffering from severe leukemia. Duffin assumed the patient had died, and that she had been asked to look over the samples for a lawsuit.
As it turned out, the patient was--and still is--very much alive. The samples were being studied by the Catholic church during the process of sainthood. Every person who was proposed for canonization had to have a required number of miracles before the process could continue. And the church needed to be sure it really was a miracle.
A good outcome was not enough for the church. Nor did a long remission count. Instead, the miracle needed to be spontaneous, and lasting. This process of canonization, which began in the 1500's, required medical doctors to agree that there was no possible scientific explanation for what had occurred.
Curious, Duffin visited the Vatican's archives and studied the miracles recorded over the past four centuries. The result of her research is this book, full of quirky facts about the miracles and the people and the doctors involved.
Take the case of Maria, who, in 1844, discovered a lump in her breast the size of a walnut."Every day it grew bigger, harder, and more painful (p 37). The doctors insisted on an instant surgery. But her priest told her about "the cause of Paolo della Croce...so for twenty days and nights, Maria prayed to the uncanonized Paolo" (p 37). On the night of Oct. 20th the lump vanished.
Some miracles are downright common, such as the incorruptibility "(preservation) or sweet odor of the corpse of a saint" (p 100). This miracle was "so frequent an occurrence ...that exhumation of the body of the would-be saint was part of the canonization process" (p 102).
Oddly, miracles that the saint performed before he died didn't count for the required number of miracles through his intercession after death. Having the stigmata may have been a sign of holiness; it had no effect on the canonization process.
Some doctors became defensive during the process, and some seemed to be left out of the loop, so that, ten years or more after seeing a patient, they are stunned to realize that same patient is still alive.
Surprise seems to be part of the process. "Just as the doctors' surprise is crucial...the patient's surprise at recovery also seems to be an important element...The devout do not presume" ( p 177).
Truly a fascinating book.
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Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints, and Healing in the Modern WorldModern culture tends to separate medicine and miracles, but their histories are closely intertwined. The Roman Catholic Church recognizes saints through canonization based on evidence that they worked miracles, as signs of their proximity to God. Physicianhistorian Jacalyn Duffin has examined Vatican sources on 1400 miracles from six continents and spanning four centuries. Overwhelmingly the miracles cited in canonizations between 1588 and 1999 are healings, and the majority entail medical care and physician testimony. These remarkable records contain intimate stories of illness, prayer, and treatment, as told by people who rarely leave traces: peasants and illiterates, men and women, old and young. A woman's breast tumor melts away; a man's wounds knit; a lame girl suddenly walks; a dead baby revives. Suspicious of wishful thinking or naïve enthusiasm, skeptical clergy shaped the inquiries to identify recoveries that remain unexplained by the best doctors of the era. The tales of healing are supplemented with substantial testimony from these physicians. Some elements of the miracles change through time. Duffin shows that doctors increase in number; new technologies are embraced quickly; diagnoses shift with altered capabilities.But other aspects of the miracles are stable. The narratives follow a dramatic structure, shaped by the formal questions asked of each witness and by perennial reactions to illness and healing. In this history, medicine and religion emerge as parallel endeavors aimed at deriving meaningful signs from particular instances of human distress -- signs to explain, alleviate, and console in confrontation with suffering and mortality. A lively, sweeping analysis of a fascinating set of records, this book also poses an exciting methodological challenge to historians: miracle stories are a vital source not only on the thoughts and feelings of ordinary people, but also on medical science and its practitioners.
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