Jacalyn Duffin, Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints, and Healing in the Modern World

Abstract

This book embarks on an admirable mission: to push a centuries-old, one-way conversation towards dialogue. For more than 400 years, the Roman Catholic Church has probed miracles attributed to prospective saints through the careful assembling of scientific evidence. Inquiries into miraculous healings, then, consist of a rigorous ‘trial’ that frequently includes the testimony of doctors to establish them as supernatural events. Candidates for sainthood advance or await canonization based upon such testimony. For her study of medical miracles, physician and historian Jacalyn Duffin surveyed ‘more than 1,400 miracles pertaining to 229 different canonizations and 145 beatifications from 1588 to 1999’, by her own accounting, about a third to one half of all miracles catalogued in the Secret Vatican Archives in Rome (p. 7). That breadth is a strength, but also a limitation, of this work. In five chapters, with informative tables, charts and appendices, Duffin examines miracles that occurred after the sixteenth-century Council of Trent initiated a series of reforms in the Catholic Church. These included the establishment of the Sacra Rituum Congregatio (SRC) charged with gathering evidence on the lives and deeds of potential saints. Then the works of every candidate for sainthood are challenged through scientific probing. In 1588, the post-Congregation era of fully-documented causes for sainthood began, and this establishes the timeline of the book. The first chapter provides a useful overview of the process for determining how one becomes recognised as a saint in the Roman Catholic Church. Organised around what Duffin calls ‘the Hippocratic triad of patient, illness, and doctor’ (p. 9), the next four chapters examine patients and the saints they invoked; the history of the changing nature of diseases that have been cured by miracles; the key role of physicians in the gathering of evidence; and finally, the social and spiritual drama that forms the narrative pattern of a cure. The chapter, ‘The Supplicants and Their Saints’, for example, includes charts that analyse the nationalities of 400 Saints and Blesseds from the era, and of the 1,400 ‘miraculés’, or persons who experienced a miracle.