Review of Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints, And Healing In The Modern World by Jacalyn Duffin

This book embarks on an admirable mission: to push a centuries-old, one-way conversation towards dialogue. For more than 400 years, the Roman Catholic Church has probed miracles attributed to prospective saints through the careful assembling of scientific evidence. Inquiries into miraculous healings, then, consist of a rigorous ‘trial’ that frequently includes the testimony of doctors to establish them as supernatural events. Candidates for sainthood advance or await canonization based upon such testimony. For her study of medical miracles, physician and historian Jacalyn Duffin surveyed ‘more than 1,400 miracles pertaining to 229 different canonizations and 145 beatifications from 1588 to 1999’, by her own accounting, about a third to one half of all miracles catalogued in the Secret Vatican Archives in Rome (p. 7). That breadth is a strength, but also a limitation, of this work