Religion and Medicine, Again: JHMAS Commentary on “The Lourdes Medical Cures Revisited”

With their 2012 essay on cures at Lourdes, Bernard François, Esther Sternberg, and Elizabeth Fee performed several good deeds for medical historians. First, they concisely summarize the complex story of organizational change at Lourdes, the most famous healing shrine in Europe. Second, they analyze all the recoveries that were officially certified as remarkable, focusing on the miraculés, their diagnoses, and duration of follow-up. Third, they draw attention to the oft-neglected realm of religious experience within modern medical practice.

In a manner that will satisfy physician readers, their approach is unapologetically presentist, relying on retrospective (even revisionist) diagnosis, scrutinizing “medical credibility,” and criticizing documentation to “determine whether the Lourdes ‘cures’ really were cures.” They write of the greater “subjectivity that still pervaded medical decisions” in the past, of medicine’s increasing “efficiency,” and of “so-called anemias.” They go so far as to hypothesize a future, reductionist explanation for the scientifically inexplicable in neuro-immunology, the research field of Sternberg.

The Lady of Lourdes, often assumed to be the Virgin, had no need of canonization. At the outset, then, no one anticipated a need to justify the validity of cures worked at her shrine until the hordes of visitors seemed to demand a measure of quality control. Then the same rules used by the Vatican for investigating miracle cures attributed to would-be saints were applied with increasing rigor at Lourdes by an interesting succession of well-intentioned and well-informed medical directors. Only a tiny proportion of the Lourdes healings were ever endorsed by medical authorities, but certified cures rose from a few in 1858 to a “Golden Age” of one hundred yearly between 1890 and 1914—and then declined to none at all between 1976 and 2006. This dramatic drop does not mean that people no longer experience healing at Lourdes; it means only that fewer candidate cures are presented for consideration—and fewer still are accepted.

Yet, nine million people went to Lourdes in 2008 on the 150th anniversary of Bernadette Soubirous’s visions, and, as the authors surmise, possibly fewer than 10 percent of those who experience cures bother to have them registered. Without specifying who might fund such an initiative, they call for better record-keeping: greater attention to claims of cure and more rigorous investigation and follow-up to provide a locus for scientific investigation into the neuro-immunological and endocrine effects of prayer, especially prayers that are deemed successful by doctors. In other words, they envisage potential for research into physiology of the human body.

Stories of religious appeals during illness are a rich source for historians who wish to explore the illness (and the healing) experiences of ordinary people in various times and places. Medievalists especially have taken these narratives seriously: Caroline Walker Bynum, Ronald Finucane, Michael Goodich, Katherine Park, and André Vauchez. A few anthropologists and sociologists, including Michael Carroll and Robert Orsi, have explored case studies of religious healing within modern health care. But physicians (and medical historians) tend to avoid the topic, deliberately ignoring this important, timeless aspect of illness experience. When the peer-reviewed medical literature bothers to address miracles, it discounts them.

The problem arises from clash of belief systems: one religious, the other medical. For the faithful, everything comes from God, and medicine is just one more manifestation of a divine work. If nine million went to Lourdes in 2008, countless more sick people stayed home to pray, whether or not they also consulted physicians. And many will attribute recovery to their god(s). The stringent attitude of a medical tribunal that accepts or rejects cures as “real” means little to them. The striving, the journeying, the praying are powerful sources of comfort and strength. It is hypocritical to second-guess a sufferer’s opinion that she is actually better. Similarly, in these days of so-called patient-centered care, it is arrogant to reject her belief that the newfound wellness arose through divine intervention—especially in the absence of any other explanation.

Physicians—and perhaps by extrapolation historians of medicine—“believe in...