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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > General > Philosophy of religion
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Medical Miracles - Doctors, Saints, and Healing in the Modern World (Hardcover)
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Medical Miracles - Doctors, Saints, and Healing in the Modern World (Hardcover)
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Modern culture tends to separate medicine and miracles, but their
histories are closely intertwined. The Roman Catholic Church
recognizes saints through canonization based on evidence that they
worked miracles, as signs of their proximity to God.
Physicianhistorian Jacalyn Duffin has examined Vatican sources on
1400 miracles from six continents and spanning four centuries.
Overwhelmingly the miracles cited in canonizations between 1588 and
1999 are healings, and the majority entail medical care and
physician testimony.
These remarkable records contain intimate stories of illness,
prayer, and treatment, as told by people who rarely leave traces:
peasants and illiterates, men and women, old and young. A woman's
breast tumor melts away; a man's wounds knit; a lame girl suddenly
walks; a dead baby revives. Suspicious of wishful thinking or naive
enthusiasm, skeptical clergy shaped the inquiries to identify
recoveries that remain unexplained by the best doctors of the era.
The tales of healing are supplemented with substantial testimony
from these physicians.
Some elements of the miracles change through time. Duffin shows
that doctors increase in number; new technologies are embraced
quickly; diagnoses shift with altered capabilities. But other
aspects of the miracles are stable. The narratives follow a
dramatic structure, shaped by the formal questions asked of each
witness and by perennial reactions to illness and healing. In this
history, medicine and religion emerge as parallel endeavors aimed
at deriving meaningful signs from particular instances of human
distress -- signs to explain, alleviate, and console in
confrontation with suffering and mortality.
A lively, sweeping analysis of a fascinating set of records, this
book also poses an exciting methodological challenge to historians:
miracle stories are a vital source not only on the thoughts and
feelings of ordinary people, but also on medical science and its
practitioners."
General
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