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

Jacalyn Duffin is a historian and hematologist by training whose initial interest in this topic was sparked by her discovery that she had unwittingly acted as a peritus (expert) in the canonization trial of the first Canadian-born saint, Marie-Marguerite Dufrost de Lajemmerais d’Youville (1701–77). Duffin’s focus is fourfold: to study how the concept of the miraculous has changed over her chosen period, to discover what it takes for a miracle to be approved by the Roman Catholic Church, to show the potential these records have for other historians, and, finally, to consider the relationship of medicine and religion. It must be said straightaway that the author largely succeeds in her ambitious project to offer the first overview of her topic for the postmedieval period. In her first chapter, she offers a brief history of canonization and sketches the role miracles played within it. Here Duffin is to be congratulated for insisting on the similarities between saint- and heretic-making. However, she might have made more of this, since the personnel involved were often one and the same, as in the case of Spanish canonist Francisco Peña, who was extensively involved with several of the trials immediately after the resumption of canonization in 1588 after a gap of sixty-five years, as well as being a leading member of the Roman Inquisition. Italian scholar Miguel Gotor (I beati del papa, 2002) has made a crucial contribution by showing how extensive was the role played by the Inquisition, which contested the authority claimed by the body specifically charged, since 1588, with making saints: the Sacred Congregation of Rites. For Duffin, the heroes of her story are the experts who managed to marry medical science with faith. None perhaps deserves the accolade more than Paolo Zacchia (1584–1659), sometime papal physician, on whose indispensable collection of case studies, collected together in ever-expanding editions of his Quaestiones medico-legales (1621ff) she draws, together with that magnificent guide to pre–Vatican II saint-making, Pope Benedict XIV’s De servorum Dei beatificatione et beatorum canonizatione (1734–38), to inform her impressive archival haul: testimonies of witnesses to no fewer than 1,409 miracles culled from the trials of all those beatified or canonized between 1588 and 1999 in the Vatican archives and library (though files that postdate 1939 are still closed to scholars, and Duffin was forced to rely on secondary sources). In chapter 2, Duffin turns to the supplicants and, with the assistance of a number of statistical tables that pepper her text to instructive effect, she skillfully balances (often moving) descriptions of individual cases with general trends. The latter include the intensity of appeals by anxious parents for their child’s cure, which flies in the face of the argument made by some historians that somehow affection for offspring on the part of premoderns was attenuated by high levels of infant mortality. In chapter 3, Duffin considers the miracles themselves and shows that physical healing was the single most important form of miracle in the seventeenth century and, if anything, increased in importance in the twentieth century (up from 87 percent to 96 percent). One of the most fascinating insights was that miracles changed as understanding of disease changed, with a shift of focus from symptoms to specific organs: “Until the eighteenth century, anatomical localization was unimportant for diagnosis” (p. 85). In chapter 4, Duffin turns to the doctors, whose presence is well chronicled from the beginning. As early as the 1601 investigation into the case of the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo (1538–84), seventeen of the sixty-five cases contained physician testimony. Chapter 5, “The Cure as Drama,” is a fitting capstone to this well-crafted and illuminating study, which marries statistical sophistication with a sensitivity to individual cases. In her conclusion, Duffin remarks on how the structure of the healing narratives over the four centuries of her study...