Were The Lourdes Miracle ‘Cures’ Really Cures?

What ‘60 Minutes,’ a Nobel laureate and others learned

When I was in elementary school, my family went on Sundays to Our Lady of Lourdes, a stately red brick church in a New Jersey suburb. My religious education was so haphazard that I had only a dim notion that its name referred to the French town where in 1858 a peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, had 18 visions of the Virgin Mary.

With Catholic Church membership declining in America, many of today’s children must know even less than I did about the woman later known as Saint Bernadette.

But the famous shrine at Lourdes is having a moment.

Late last year, “60 Minutes” did a sympathetic report on the purported cures described by pilgrims drawn to its famous grotto and waters that the faithful believe to have healing properties.

More recently, a respected British journalist and author wrote that an old foot injury vanished after three days at Lourdes. She also said the visit brought happiness to her 39-year-old son with Asperger’s.

And the number of pilgrims appears to be rebounding after a pandemic slump fostered in part by headlines like: “Lourdes Shrine Closes Healing Pools As Precaution Against Coronavirus.”

But are the Lourdes miracle “cures” really miracles? Or do they involve something else, such as fakery, autosuggestion, the placebo effect, or spontaneous medical remission?

Visitors to the shrine have been reporting cures unexplained by science for more than 150 years, and its officials have records of more than 7,000 of them. But they have certified only of 70 of those cases as miracles.

That number doesn’t suggest mass fraud. Nor does the rigorous vetting process described on “60 Minutes.”

Certification requires “a tremendous amount of medical documentation and a patient’s willingness to put their life under a microscope,” the news show found. It spoke to people who’d had their cures certified and to Alessandro de Franciscis, the physician and Harvard-trained epidemiologist who oversees the verification process as president of the Lourdes Office of Medical Observations.

De Franciscis has said that the vetting has three parts:

“The first is the ailment: it must be a known condition in the medical community and must be a severe prognosis. The second factor is the alleged cure itself, which has four components: it must be an unexpected cure, an instantaneous cure, a complete cure, and a cure which lasts forever. The third and final factor is that the cure must be inexplicable according to current medical knowledge.”

The decisions of the Medical Observations office are reviewed by the International Medical Committee of Lourdes, which in 2008 took a further step toward bolstering its credibility when it decided to stop calling the unexplained cures “miracles” and to describe them instead as “remarkable.” Even so, no case has been certified in a decade.

How trustworthy are the judgments of the Lourdes representatives?

A decade ago, two eminent doctors and internationally known medical historians studied hundreds of purported cures that occurred between 1858 and 1976 and published their results in Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. They suggested that “autosuggestion and the placebo effect played a role in a number of improvements and allegations of cures.” The results were nonetheless powerful:

“Spontaneous remissions of diseases, especially of cancers, do not measure up to the speed, power, and variety of the Lourdes cures.”

Their conclusions might not have surprised Alexis Carrel, the French surgeon who won the 1912 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his trailblazing work on vascular suturing, which saved thousands of lives in World War I and afterward.

Carrel, raised Catholic, was an agnostic when they visited Lourdes in July 1903, intending only to observe the patients. But he underwent a life-changing religious conversion after seeing the dramatic healing of a young French woman at the shrine. Marie Bailly had arrived gravely ill with tuberculous peritonitis but recovered with dramatic speed and permanence at the grotto where Bernadette claimed to have had her visions.

Carrel wrote about what he had observed in a moving and graceful fictionalized memoir, The Voyage to Lourdes (Harper, 1950), published four years after his death, which described the experiences of a young “Dr. Lerrac” (his name spelled backward). Decades later, his book remains the rare account of the emotions a doctor cycled through as struggled to reconcile what he saw at Lourdes with his medical knowledge.His feelings included disbelief, confusion, and finally acceptance.

“Science, of course, must be continually on guard against charlatanism and credulousness,” Carrel concluded in The Voyage to Lourdes. “But is also the duty of science not to reject things simply because they appear extraordinary or because science is powerless to explain them.”

To this day, Lourdes officials say, no evidence has disproved the stories of any of the 70 pilgrims whose cases they have certified. Whether you call the recoveries “miracles” or just “remarkable,” physicians rightly say their experiences merit further study.

“Uncanny and weird, the cures are currently beyond our ken but still impressive, incredibly effective, and awaiting a scientific explanation,” said the doctors and medical historian who wrote about the Lourdes cases in Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences.

Like Carrel, those experts struggled to reconcile the evidence from Lourdes with their experiences as medical professionals.

“After many mental twists and turns, we reached the same conclusions as Carrel some eighty to hundred years ago: ‘Instead of being a simple place of miracles, of interest only to the pious, Lourdes presents a considerable scientific interest.’ ”

Going a step further than the Nobel laureate, they added that “understanding these processes could bring about new and effective therapeutic methods.”

@JaniceHarayda is an award-winning critic and journalist who has been a writer and editor for Glamour and the book editor of Ohio’s largest newspaper. She has written for many major print and online media, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and Salon.