Book Review

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

N Engl J Med 2009; 360:2261-2262May 21, 2009

Article

Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints, and Healing in the Modern World
By Jacalyn Duffin. 285 pp., illustrated. New York, Oxford University Press, 2009. $29.95. ISBN: 978-0-19-533650-4

This book is an important new study of the relationship between religion and medicine. Penned by a well-established medical scientist and modern historian, it places this relationship at the forefront of research on miracles. Historians of medieval times have been tackling the subject of miracles for many years, but there is perhaps a tendency to see their research as the product of a more religious age. Jacalyn Duffin, who is indebted to medievalists such as Joseph Ziegler and Michael Goodich for her approach, shows that there is considerable continuity in how humans have dealt with illness over the centuries. However, unlike medievalists, who now feel comfortable discussing miracles, Duffin often has to justify her topic in the face of skepticism from her colleagues.

The level of personal reflection is what gives this book its depth. In 1990, Duffin was asked to provide expert testimony about a case of leukemia that was later used as evidence for the canonization of a Canadian saint, and this assignment sparked her interest in the vast archives of the Vatican. Step by step, she guides us through her analysis of more than 1400 miracles dating from 1588 to the present. Hampered by the wealth of records and the linguistic and paleographic difficulties they represent, this study only scratches the surface, inviting further research.

After an opening chapter on the making of saints, Duffin takes a statistical approach to miracles in chapters on the supplicants and the saints, the illnesses that were involved, the role of the doctor, and the various dramas — such as invocations and pilgrimages — that were enacted in quests for cures. With so many miracles, drawn from six continents, the statistical approach is unavoidable, but it does lead to a lack of specificity. Many of these cases demand the kind of contextualized micro-study that medievalists now undertake. Yet Duffin recognizes the limitations of her survey, and she is committed to nonretrospective diagnosis of illness.

One of Duffin's most surprising discoveries is that papal investigators of miracles have always understood that standards of medical care have shifted throughout the centuries. Decades can elapse between the cure and the inquiry, meaning that papal investigators have always accepted a far greater degree of historical relativism than is normally accepted today. Duffin was surprised to find that up-to-date medical science has always been crucial in the canonization process. For a cure to receive consideration as a miracle, the person who was cured has to have been treated according to the best practices and the most advanced treatment for the time and place in which he or she lived, and it must be demonstrated that the treatment failed. The study of miracles therefore provides insight on how forms of technology such as stethoscopes, thermometers, x-rays, and chemotherapy entered into the experience of medical practitioners and patients.

There can be no miracle if there has been no attempt at medical treatment, and rejection of medicine on pious grounds has always been frowned upon by the Catholic Church. The result is that over the centuries, healing miracles have become increasingly medicalized, and medical testimony — even by non-Catholics and atheists — is still crucial to canonization. Medievalists have shown that this was already the case in the 13th century, but Duffin's book indicates that right up to the present day, religion and medicine remain closely intertwined. Duffin argues that religion and medicine are remarkably similar belief systems, with the same attention to evidence and standards of proof, and that both exist as ways for people to deal with suffering and dying. Although this study will no doubt prove controversial among physicians, it opens up a realm of opportunities to historians, for whom it will no doubt become a seminal work. Medievalists, too, will now have to reconsider their own work in the light of Duffin's findings.

Iona McCleery, Ph.D.
University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom
i.mccleery@leeds.ac.uk