Émile Zola's Lourdes: Land of Healing and Rupture

^Emile Zola's Lourdes: Land of Healing and Rupture Barbara Corrado Pope Until recent centuries in Europe, no hard and fast distinction separated medicine and magic or science and religion. Healers came in many forms: university-trained doctors (whose education was more philosophical than anatomical), barber-surgeons, and lay persons who relied upon traditional knowledge of herbs and potions, the body and the psyche to care for their clients. Among these lay healers, the lines between magic and science were particularly blurred. Moreover, in Christian Europe, there existed a tradition of miraculous healing, attributed to the intervention of God or his intermediaries—the Virgin Mary, the saints, and in some times and places, even anointed kings. Belief in miracles went back to Christ himself, who through "laying on of hands" had vanquished illnesses and even raised a man from the dead. During the middle ages and early modern times, Europeans knew that a miraculous cure could happen at any time, if divinity so willed it. But they also recognized that their pleas would become even more efficacious if they were delivered at certain times or places or in the presence of objects connected to blessed beings. Thus at appointed seasons, pilgrims traveled to faraway shrines that held relics of Jesus and his saints or went to nearby divinely blessed springs and rocks (many of which had previously served pagan supplicants ). Beginning with the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the "art of healing" was increasingly transformed into the "science of prevention and cure." Gradually, university-trained doctors began to rely more and more upon the new scientific methods of experimentation and direct observation rather than the study of ancient texts as a guide to appropriate treatments. After Isaac Newton demonstrated that the universe operates according to natural laws, eighteenth-century intellectuals demanded a clearer distinction between reason and science on the one hand, and religion and superstition on the other. They held that both cause and cure of human illness are to be found in the physical environment or in the body itself, not in supernatural interventions. By the late nineteenth century, after discovery of the germ theory of disease, doctors Literature and Medicine 8 (1989) 22-35 © 1989 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Barbara Corrado Pope 23 as a group were more confident than ever before. The profession had become a male bastion, which prided itself on its rational and scientific approach to human misery. Riding on the high tide of increasing secularism and glorification of science, the medical men gained unprecedented influence. In the cities and towns of Europe, they monopolized health services. They formulated social policies for their governments and gave moral advice to middle-class families. Doctors also, through the vast literature they produced, developed a gender ideology that thoroughly suited their own interests and the prejudices of the day: They demonstrated that men were the strong and rational sex, capable of understanding and practicing science, and that women were weak, emotional, and naturally susceptible to religious belief. Intellectuals and artists like Émile Zola relied upon doctor friends and medical literature for many of their theories and ideas. Yet despite the enormous prestige of the medical profession, the late nineteenth century also witnessed a revival of what secular intellectual males could only think of as superstitious religious beliefs. One aspect of this resurgence was belief in divine intervention and miraculous cures. The most remarkable manifestation of this revival occurred in Lourdes, France, at the very center of the debate between the secular and religious world view. The events at Lourdes still reverberate today, for this shrine in the French Pyrenees remains the greatest faith-healing center in the world. It attracts more than five million pilgrims each year and has come to be known as the place of last resort for the most hopeless medical cases. Yet physical healing is only one aspect of the shrine's attraction. For the Catholic Church, which interprets and controls the activities at the shrine, and for the pilgrims themselves, the most profound promise of Lourdes has always been that it would heal all wounds that assail the human spirit and the human community, that it would offer spiritual...