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

Jacalyn Duffin’s impressive study of medical miracles is based on research conducted in the Vatican Secret Archives. Duffin has examined the inquiries, or “processes,” conducted for 229 canonizations and 145 beatifications from the late sixteenth century to the present, and out of these proceedings she has compiled an enormous compendium of miracle accounts that comprises the raw material for her work.

Duffin sets out four goals for her book: first, to analyze how miracles were conceived of in the past and how this conception changed over time; second, to explore how the category of the miraculous was defined in the Roman Catholic tradition; third, to alert other historians to the potential of the documentary resources available in the Vatican archive; and fourth, to explore the relationship between medicine and religion as “semiotic endeavors.”

In pursuing her first goal, Duffin found, to her surprise, that 95 percent of the miracles in the canonization proceedings she examined were purported healings. This was not always the case, however. The percentage of healing miracles increased over the course of the Middle Ages and by the time of the Council of Trent they constituted the vast majority of miracles reported. This upward trend has continued, according to Duffin’s calculations, into the present. Duffin also discerns variation over time in the kinds of illnesses that were claimed to be miraculously cured. This variation corresponds to changes in the classification of disease, technological advances, and increasingly effective medical intervention. Tuberculosis, for example, appears in the miracle files only after it had been identified as a discrete illness and was able to be more reliably diagnosed with the advent of the stethoscope. Miraculous cures of tuberculosis increased accordingly until new treatments appeared in the mid-twentieth century, along with the realization that the disease could sometimes spontaneously abate, at which point the diagnosis disappears from the miracle records.

With regard to her second goal, Duffin provides a detailed account of how the Catholic Church adopted a procedural, legalistic approach toward defining the miraculous and argues persuasively that medical miracles had an important influence in this process. Duffin begins her account with the establishment of the Holy Congregation of Rites in 1587, which rationalized the process of canonization and thereby ushered in the modern era of saint making. In the post-Congregation era, the Catholic Church implemented a host of new bureaucratic procedures for determining the sanctity of candidates for sainthood and insisted on rigorous evidentiary standards for verifying miracles. Because so many would-be miracles had to do with healing, the Church was particularly concerned with setting up stringent protocols for the investigation of medical miracles, and Duffin emphasizes the important roles of Paolo Zacchia and Prospero Lambertini in this process. Both Zacchia in the seventeenth century and Lambertini in the eighteenth sought to reconcile the management of miracles with the most current medical knowledge available and in doing so enhanced the role of physicians as key witnesses in the canonization process. For Duffin, the remarkable stability and longevity of the Catholic apparatus for certifying miracles amounts to a contextual, pragmatic definition of the miraculous. Rather than offering an abstract theological or philosophical analysis, she opts instead for a “bottom-up” definition, claiming simply that “these events were miracles for the people involved” (183).

Duffin’s third goal is particularly noteworthy. Her book is a treasure trove of valuable materials gleaned from the archives in a herculean scholarly effort. Having managed to collect accounts of over 1400 miracles—at least one from every canonization process from 1588 to 1999—Duffin was faced with the daunting prospect of organizing this mass of data. To her credit, she has made the book an enjoyable and accessible read by organizing it thematically around the “Hippocratic triad of patient, illness, and doctor” (9) and deftly combining quantitative evidence with engaging anecdotes and case studies. Medical Miracles already constitutes a rich resource for historians of medicine, science, and religion, but in a...