Jacalyn Duffin

Sara Ahmed

RELS 131A

11/21/2014

Dr. Young

TA: Savoula Stylianou

Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints, and Healing in the Modern World.

Book review

In 2009 Jacalyn Duffin introduced an impressive research study. Duffin’s research was about medical miracles, which was conduct from the Vatican Secret Archives, and she brought it all together in book. Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints, and Healing in the Modern World. The author examines the inquiries, and processes from the contacts that she was able to collect from 229 canonizations and 145 beatifications. This research started from late sixteenth century to the present time. Out of these proceedings the author compiles a massive collection of miracle accounts that comprises the raw material for her work. Duffin sets out a number of goals for her book and these goals are divided to two parts that will be analyzed in this paper; the first goal that the author presents in her book is how miracles formula the past and how the conception of miracles change over time. The second one, and the most important goal is to explorer the relationship between medicine and religion.  Using these goals Duffin proves that religion and medicine are remarkably similar belief systems. With the same intention the author uses evidence and standards to show that both religion and sciences exist as ways for people to deal with life, suffering and dying.

The book Medical Miracles: Doctor, Saints and Healing in the Modern World, studies the relationship between religion and science. The book is well established by a medical, scientist and modern historian, Jacalyn Duffin. The level of personal reflection gives this book its depth sense, where the author applies her own experience and compiles an impressive amount of data that had been procures largely from four trips to the Vatican Secret Archives.  She guides the reader through the analysis of more than 1400 miracles dating from 1588. The author aims to explain the motivations behind festivals to the two saints in the “New World”, and she uncovers how these events connect. She also introduces the reader to the richness of the medical documentations from worshipers for the causes of saints. The author presents the history of the canonization of miracles, and in her three central chapters she presents the main protagonists of what she calls “drama of the cure”(p. 9). That’s where she sketches and abundantly illustrates the idea with representation and statistical tables. In the last chapter the author examines the interaction between religions and medicine and provides new perspectives on the experience. Demonstrating that religion and science have never been on the opposite sides of each other, and like Duffin notes religion sits in a more comfortable place with medical science than vice verse.

        Duffin’s first goal in this book is found after she examined 95% miracles. The examination was surprising to her; the author shows increasing of percentage of healing by miracles over the period of the middle Ages. Healing miracles has always been a part of humanity since the biblical times, where they appeared mostly in the medieval time. The author also explains this point using Vauches as an example where she mentions how he “ found cures of illness constituted 80 to 90 percent” (pg.17). Vauches did not just find cures but also recorded and gathered enormous collections of medieval miracles. The author did not stop with her explanation; she also explains medical miracles process by motioning more modern examples. She talks about the reformation of the Church in 1588, and how it will continue in the process in the future. She was proving that through talking about new saints, such as Carlo Borromo of Milan, who is known by many people through out the years for “curing illness and helping victims of epidemics during their earthly live”(pg 17). The author sees Borrmom’s cause as a special and interstice, its is known as the “apostle” of the Council of Trent. He is the first saint canonized under the new order that he was a part of creating. Brormom helped implement many things that changed the church’s procedures. The author also mentions how Borromeos was faithful to care for the sick and those in need, which made him to be well recognized, an important part of the Turchini analyses and the printed testimony of over hundred miracles which were investigated from Milan. She also mentions a Pope who takes a special interest in both medicine and care provision, Pope Sixtus V, who also created the Roman Curia. On the part of the theologians there was an absence of a clear universal vision of what might be required for the ascertainment of miracle cure. The author also shows reorganization of medical science and how it is not highly developed to enable physicians to always recognize what is supposed to be miracles. The author also mentions a famous Roman physician, Paolo Zacchia, “ Medical experts working for Vatican continued to cite Zacchia” (pg. 25) who attempted to deal with this problem. In his book Quaestiones medico-legales that he published in 1657, and which had been reprinted many times in several different countries. The Author demonstrates how Zacchia’s conclusions are so highly considered by the theologians from all over the world. His influence and canonization development of both the personal and intellectual was quite obvious regardless of the difficulties people face to understand it understanding.