Medical Research at Lourdes
Genuine religious healing has occurred simply too often among too many kinds of people to be dismissed as a stunted response to adversity. Nowhere in modern times has this fact been more evident than at Lourdes, which is now visited annually by some 4 million pilgrims.
Several million people suffering a serious affliction have come from every part of the world to the shrine since its founding in 1858. In 1952, for example, 734 French, 229 Italian, 157 Belgian, 47 British, 25 German, 26 Swiss, 21 American, 15 African and 8 Indian medical people either witnessed or experienced cures at the shrine,1 and among them there were Protestants, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Mohammedans and agnostics, as well as Catholics, some of them skeptical about religious claims.
Many doctors who visit Lourdes, moreover, work with the Bureau des Constatations Medicales in its long-standing effort to verify and understand cures there. Founded in 1883, the Bureau requires sick pilgrims to bring medical documents and register with the Medical Bureau when they arrive ... so that they may be cared for properly at the sanctuary’s hospitals and subsequently studied if they are cured. Physicians and medical researchers are encouraged to join the Bureau’s special sittings where cures at the shrine are examined; and 2,000 or more may do so in a typical year, many of them contributing to the written accounts which are made of those cases which seem to be authentic. Every person who is examined by the Bureau is asked to undergo a second examination one year later at Lourdes, while inquiries are made among the doctors who treated them. If there is not a second examination, or if any crucial piece of evidence is missing, the entire case is rejected. If on the other hand all conditions of the inquiry are met, a complete dossier is sent to the International Medical Committee of Lourdes composed of scientists and physicians from several nations, which takes up the investigation once more. If the findings of this study are positive, the Medical Bureau transmits them to the patient’s bishop who may proclaim the cure to be miraculous. This process is so demanding that presently only 64 cures among the tens of thousands that have occurred at the Grotto since its founding in 1858 have been deemed miraculous by a bishop’s authority.2
Because the cures at Lourdes have been screened with such care and examined from so many points of view, there is overwhelming evidence that many of them are authentic. Though medical science cannot explain them all, there can be no doubt that a great number of them happened just as their witnesses said. The Bureau’s careful work, furthermore, has produced a huge store of case histories which provide many insights regarding the body’s remarkable responsiveness to spiritual influence. Its archives contain, conceivably, the world’s largest and richest source of evidence for the authenticity and power of religious healing.
Alexis Carrel, for example, a Nobel laureate in medicine and medical director of the Rockefeller Institute, told the story of his first trip to Lourdes in 1903 with painstaking honesty.3 Having gone there as a curious skeptic, he attached himself to a woman with a hopeless case of tubercular peritonitis. While he watched, her sickly features changed so dramatically that he felt he might be suffering an hallucination. Then, before his eyes, a large abdominal tumor which had filled her navel with pus disappeared within a few minutes, and to his astonishment she seemed free of pain. Later that day, when he visited her at a local hospital, he found her sitting up in bed, eyes gleaming and her cheeks full of color. Her abdomen seemed normal, showing no sign of the hopeless-looking tumor he had seen a few hours before, and it did not hurt when he pressed it. This and other cases convinced him that many of the cures at Lourdcs were authentic, whether they were "miracles" or not, and could not be attributed solely to the relief of functional disorders. Like the woman with peritonitis whose tumor had vanished, other cases he witnessed had seemed intractable before they were healed, exhibiting destruction of tissue and malignant growths accompanied by extreme debilitation. As a rationalist and scientist, he said, he was forced by his experience at Lourdes to admit that human beings possessed mysterious capacities which science should explore as thoroughly as it did germs and new surgical procedures.4
The following cases illustrate the range of organic disorders which have been healed at Lourdes:
Francis Pascal, born a normal child, was afflicted with meningitis when he was three. The disease left him completely blind and partly paralyzed. In August, 1938, when he was four, he was instantly cured after two immersions in the springs at Lourdes. Members of the Bureau and other medical experts confirmed that both his blindness and paralysis were organic, not functional. The archbishop of Aix-en-Provence declared the cure to be miraculous on May 31, 1949, and Pascal lived to be a normal adult.1
When he was 2 1/2 years old, Gerard Bailie was stricken with bilateral chorioretinitis and double optic atrophy, a disease which is normally incurable, and lost his sight after an operation. In September, 1947, when he was six, his blindness was cured during a visit to Lourdes. Although his affliction was thought to be incurable because his optic nerves had atrophied, he could see objects clearly upon reexamination by the Medical Bureau one year later. Cardinal Lienart of Lille, in whose diocese the boy lived, would not declare the cure to be miraculous, however, showing the caution with which the church has come to approach any phenomenon that is deemed to be miraculous.1
In 1976, Delizia Cirolli, a child from Sicily, developed a painfully swollen right knee that was diagnosed to be the result of a metastatic neuroblastoma. Her parents refused to have her leg amputated, and her mother took her to Lourdes. But x-rays taken the following month showed no improvement in the girl’s condition and the family began to prepare for her funeral. Friends and sympathizers continued to pray to the Virgin of Lourdes, however, and Delizia was regularly given water from the shrine. Then in December, some three months after the condition had appeared, it suddenly vanished. X-rays showed repair of the bone which had metastisized. Four trips to the Medical Bureau in 1977, 1978, 1979, and 1980 showed that the cure was permanent and complete, though various investigators concluded that the affliction had been a case of Ewing’s tumor. The International Medical Committee of Lourdes decided that Ewing’s tumor was the correct diagnosis. In describing the case, Committee member St. John Dowling wrote that "spontaneous remission of neuroblastoma has been reported, but very rarely and never after the age of 5. Spontaneous remission of Ewings tumor has not been recorded."2
In an article published by the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Dr. Dow ling presented a list of cases deemed by the Church to be miraculous. I include it here to show the severity of afflictions which have been cured at Lourdes, and the long duration of their remission.
Impressive as such cures at Lourdes have been, they are no more dramatic than those produced by religious healers in other cultures. Though it is impossible to estimate their number with much confidence, we know they occur all over the world. Among the stone-age people of Siberia, the Sufis of the Middle East, the tribes of Polynesia, the Hopis and Navajo of the American Southwest, the Umbanda and Espintista cults in Brazil, the practitioners of Haitian Voodoo, the Australian aborigines, and the Kalahari bushmen, healing rituals enjoy enough success to maintain religious belief and cultural solidarity. Their success leads us to ask: What is the continuum of belief, ritual, and symbolic process which stimulates the healing system?
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