Miracle Cures Saints, Pilgrimage, And The Healing Powers Of Belief

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 33 (2011) 109-169

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Robert A. Scott, Miracle Cures: Saints, Pilgrimage, and the Healing Powers of Belief (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), xxxi + 235 pp. $24.95 hardback.

Miracle Cures, by Robert Scott, is two books in one. Te ﬁrst half is a survey of medieval and early modern pilgrimages in search of healing. Drawing on Scott’s previous research in medieval Catholicism, the ﬁrst chapter describes unhealthful living conditions that made the prospect of supernatural healing seem attractive. Te next three chapters explain the speciﬁc appeal of saints, apparitions, pilgrimages, and shrines. Te explanations oﬀered recall Robert Anderson’s “deprivation thesis” articulated in Vision of the Disinherited (1979), but do not attend to more recent scholarship challenging Anderson’s thesis, for instance, Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, A Teory of Religion (1987). Tis section of the book is clearly written without scholarly apparatus getting in the way, but it is largely syn- thetic. It provides an accessible introduction to the subject matter, but for readers who have a basic familiarity with work on medieval and early modern Catholicism and on more recent Catholic healing practices — for instance, Ruth Harris’s study of Lourdes (1999), which Scott draws on, and Robert Orsi’s several related books, including Tank You, St. Jude (1996) — there is not much conceptually new here.

Te second half of the book is quite diﬀerent. Tese four chapters survey twentieth and twenty-ﬁrst century understandings of disease and medical and psychological research on the placebo eﬀect, and then — and this is the major contribution of the book — apply the ﬁndings of recent clinical studies to interpret medieval and early modern healing practices. Scott concludes that the “relief pilgrims experienced came from the poppy ﬁelds of the mind” (147), by which he means the “body’s own . . . ability to produce opioids” (144) or biochemical blockers that diminish pain perception. Scott asserts that he does not “dismiss, negate, or supplant the views of religious believers but instead extend[s] the modern under- standing of what transpires in the body and mind when the faithful report that they gain relief from their suﬀering by appealing to saints” (xviii). In eﬀect, however, Scott’s explana- tions domesticate “miracle cures” within the paradigm of scientiﬁc naturalism in a manner that closes down rather than opens up analysis of the claims themselves within their own cultural context. Te text is implicitly and sometimes explicitly belittling of supposedly benighted past generations who lacked the beneﬁt of modern diagnoses and knowledge of self-limiting conditions. A better book of similar scope is Jaclyn Duﬃn’s Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints, and Healing in the Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2009), which is based on extensive research in the Vatican archives detailing miracle claims since the six- teenth century — most of which were accompanied by reports from medical doctors who investigated the cases. Strangely, Scott cites Duﬃn on a minor point in a footnote, but does not engage with her strikingly diﬀerent methodology.

Te recent scientiﬁc research summarized in part two of the book is informative and interesting, but the application to medieval and early modern healing is unconvincing. Although gesturing brieﬂy toward scholarship demonstrating that disease, illness, experi- ences of pain, and understandings of the human body all vary tremendously across history and cultures, Scott’s analysis proceeds as if no meaningful diﬀerences existed between exam- ples drawn from the twenty-ﬁrst century United States and medieval Europe. Scott’s rea- soning proceeds as follows: “Recent studies of health and illness suggest that social and

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 33 (2011) 109-169

emotional diﬃculties are among the root causes of many illnesses” (121). He then acknowl- edges that, “because we lack clinical data for the medieval period, we cannot say, of course, that these factors were singly or collectively responsible for anyone’s illness” (121). But, he nevertheless concludes that the “persistent stresses associated with everyday life during the Middle Ages may have rendered populations vulnerable to infections and other illnesses” (123). As individuals went on pilgrimage to a healing shrine, “it seems equally plausible to suggest that once an individual was removed from exposure to these sources of stress, the toll on the immune system would lessen” (123), and people would credit their diminish- ment in pain to the saint implored.

Bringing clinical research to bear on “miracle cure” claims could be a very fruitful proj- ect. It would, however, make more sense either to make use of historical medical evidence, as Duﬃn does, or to investigate recent claims for which much more information is available rather than attempting, as Scott does, to use generalized discussions of current research and lay descriptions of illness to render diagnoses and prognoses retrospectively on cases drawn from the medieval period. Te book’s “Coda” gestures brieﬂy toward how the internet and photographic technologies have inﬂuenced twenty-ﬁrst century practices pertaining to apparitions of saints. Strangely, the Coda does not meaningfully discuss recent miracle claims, although a great many such claims continue to be made. By failing to extend his interpretations to recent claims, Scott eﬀectually ignores some of the most relevant and accessible data that bear on his hypotheses. Tis is a critical issue, as it is unclear whether the book’s hypotheses are tenable in light of more recent information.

Tis book reﬂects current scholarly as well as popular interest in deploying scientiﬁc research to investigate the eﬃcacy of alternative healing practices such as prayer. Unfortu- nately, many interested readers who admire the language of science lack speciﬁc scientiﬁc knowledge. Te danger in this is that it is all too easy and tempting for scholars to wave the wand of scientiﬁc citations without making serious connections to the data that this research purportedly explains. Tis propensity hinders rather than advances understanding of the phenomena under investigation.

Miracle Cures is important for calling attention to the value of making connections between research conducted in the humanities and sciences on the subjects of health, ill- ness, and healing. Te book is, however, more useful in suggesting questions for future study than in developing a methodology suited to answering these questions.

Reviewed by Candy Gunther Brown Associate Professor of Religious Studies Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana [email protected]

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