Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints, and Healing in the Modern World
"For individual sufferers, healing and survival can be both spiritual and physical experiences. Dr. Duffin -- medical practitioner and historian -- boldly delves into a seldom-analyzed relationship between religion and medicine. Medically attested miracles are an unusual topic for research, often featured to praise or ridicule phenomena lacking scientific explanation. The author's meticulous and balanced analysis of past investigations into the miraculous coupled with her keen clinical eye will be widely read and discussed by skeptics and believers alike." --Guenter B. Risse, M.D., Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, University of California, San Francisco"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...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."--New England Journal of Medicine"A thoroughly engaging, daring exploration of depositions from canonization proceedings in the Vatican Archives that reveals the centrality of medical judgment and physicians' testimony in the adjudication of miracles during the past four hundred years. Rich in stories about the place and meanings of miracles in everyday life, in Duffin's hands these records offer astonishingly fresh insight into the interplay between religion and medicine and into the wider cultural power of medicine in the modern world." --John Harley Warner, Avalon Professor of the History of Medicine, Yale University"Drawing upon Vatican canonization records, Jacalyn Duffin's study of healing miracles examines the sometimes competitive, sometimes complementary relationships between pre-modern and modern medicine and the cult of the saints. Her thorough reading of some 1,400 miracle accounts unearths patterns of spiritual healing that have been a vital part of Europeans' lives and her keen eye for detail provides welcome insights into the long-neglected story of faith and its healing potential." --Philip Soergel, Department of History, University of Maryland"Duffin's account of the medical history of the canonization process is in many respects revelatory....Duffin's interrogation of the records is thoughtful and multilayered; the reflections in her concluding section are of special interest, because they relate to the relationship between religion, medicine, and the miracles of healing."--JAMA"Written by a medical historian, this research is of great interest."--Pediatric Endocrinology Reviews"This is pioneering research with great theoretical and practical interest; it should engage anyone curous about the unknown limits of human capacity."--Journal of Scientific Exploration