Medical Miracles: Religious and Secular

We hear a lot these days about “the miracles of modern medicine.” But, when it comes to true miracle cures, the old ones are still often the best.

I was pleased to hear a dead parishioner has just been recognized by my local archbishop, the Most Reverend Malcolm McMahon, as the first English Catholic to have officially received a miracle cure at Lourdes, the renowned French shrine where the peasant visionary Bernadette Soubirous enjoyed a series of notable Marian visions in 1858. 

Here, this formerly sick individual was inexplicably healed through “a miracle wrought by the power of God through the intercession of Our Lady of Lourdes,” according to the judgment of Archbishop McMahon, as issued in a celebratory public letter to the faithful issued on December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. 

The patient in question was John “Jack” Traynor. Born in the north-west English city of Liverpool in 1883, Jack served in Britain’s merchant navy before joining up to fight in WWI. He was hit by enemy machine-gun fire during a bayonet charge at Gallipoli, Turkey, in 1915. Traynor’s injuries were severe: he subsequently suffered epilepsy and lost use of his right arm with nerve damage. An operation in 1920 only had the unfortunate effect of causing further paralysis in both Traynor’s legs. 

Newly uncovered archival documents have now confirmed what happened next, however: “an extraordinary cure…. Absolutely above and beyond the powers of nature.”

Government doctors from the U.K.’s old Ministry of Pensions declared Traynor to be “completely and incurably incapacitated,” granting him a war pension for life. Jack, though, stubbornly refused to submit, recalling the intense Catholic faith of his Irish mother, who died during his early childhood. 

Pawning his family’s few valuables, in July 1923, just before being consigned to the Mossley Hill Hospital for Incurables in his wheelchair, Traynor embarked upon a parish-organized pilgrimage to Lourdes, bathing nine times in water from the place’s famous supernaturally revealed spring.      

Before long, he had regained use of his withered arm—the first use he made of it was to make the Sign of the Cross in thanks to Mary. His legs, too, regained their function—he ran straight from his hospital bed, barefoot over sharp gravel, to pray at the grotto where Mary had once appeared. 

Furthermore, the many sores on Jack’s body healed completely, his epilepsy vanished, and, most remarkably of all, a hole in his skull, created during previous brain surgery, somehow grew back over “considerably.” So complete was Traynor’s recovery that he went on to have three children, one of whom he naturally named Bernadette.     

It was absolutely undeniable that Traynor, who had been at death’s door when he first arrived in France, recovered his health completely. According to his own post-Lourdes testimony, so hale and hearty did he grow that Jack was able to become a heavy manual laborer:

I am in the coal and haulage business now. I have four lorries or trucks and about a dozen men working for me. I work with them. I lift sacks of coal weighing around 200 pounds with the best of them and I can do any other work that an able-bodied man can do. But officially I am still classified as 100 per cent disabled and permanently incapacitated!

This final fact is particularly interesting, as it reveals the doctors from the Ministry of Pensions quite literally refused to believe the evidence of their own eyes. Quite clearly, Jack Traynor could now move around completely unhindered, to the extent he could lug big sacks of heavy coal around on his back, day in, day out. And yet, the men from the Ministry had previously deemed him to be “completely and incurably incapacitated” for life, and so, in their eyes, incapacitated he had to remain—perpetually eligible for a disability pension without any actual disability to warrant it.

This reminds me of the most oft-repeated skeptical quote about Lourdes, that of the French poet and journalist Anatole France who, in his 1895 essay Miracle, reported that a friend, when observing the large pile of discarded crutches by the grotto left behind by cured former invalids who felt Mary had dispelled their lameness, joked that “One wooden leg would be more to the point.”

This is usually taken as meaning that, although hardline skeptics on such matters, France and his friend would have felt grudgingly compelled to believe in the grotto’s healing powers if the place had magically made an amputee’s missing leg grow back. 

Actually, France’s disbelief was even greater than this. If you read his full essay, the writer observed that “speaking philosophically, the wooden leg would be no whit more convincing than a crutch,” for “an observer of a genuinely scientific spirit” would simply be forced to conclude thus:

An observation, so far unique, points us to a presumption that under conditions still undetermined, the tissues of a human leg have the property of reorganizing themselves like a crab’s or lobster’s claws and a lizard’s tail, but much more rapidly… What is the definition of a miracle? We are told: a breach of the laws of nature. But we do not know the laws of nature; how, then, are we to know whether a particular fact is a breach of these laws or no?

Just like the professionally blind doctors of the Ministry of Pensions, Anatole France would quite literally have preferred to disbelieve the evidence of his own eyes than admit the possibility of the existence of superior powers.  Just like the professionally blind doctors of the Ministry of Pensions, Anatole France would quite literally have preferred to disbelieve the evidence of his own eyes than admit the possibility of the existence of superior powers. Tweet This

If today’s men of science feel disinclined to accept the idea of miraculous medical powers wielded in the name of religion, then they do seem curiously eager to accept miraculous medical powers wielded in the name of the secular State. Although it did not exist during the lifetime of Jack Traynor, it is often said that Britain’s post-WWII National Health Service (NHS) is, in the 1992 words of the country’s former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson, “the closest thing the English have to a religion, with those who practice in it regarding themselves as a priesthood,” therefore making it “extraordinarily difficult to reform.”

The problem is that the NHS is free at point of use, which many users incorrectly interpret as meaning it is thus “free” entirely. Unlike in America, nobody has to pay medical insurance to use it, not even the rich—but this only obscures the fact people do have to fund it from their general taxation. Hence, even though it offers a poor service as often as a good one, the fact it is offering any service at all, apparently gratis, means many on the Left view it as a secular, charitable church. 

In 1976, the left-wing Labour Party’s then-Secretary of State for Health, Barbara Castle, explicitly said so: “Intrinsically the National Health Service is a church. It is the nearest thing to the embodiment of the Good Samaritan that we have in any respect of our public policy.”

In the years since, this belief has only grown. In 2020, during the Covid pandemic, citizens were urged to stand outside their homes every evening at a given, government-appointed time and “Clap for Carers” in a bizarre, quasi-religious ceremony. Intrigued, the U.K.’s Religion Media Centre commissioned a study by Linda Woodhead, Professor of Religion and Society at Lancaster University, who wrote:

When faced with a biblical plague, the British turn not to God but the National Health Service. It is our national religion, the one thing sacred. It is here rather than in our national churches that we now affirm our shared values, reinforce a sense of collective identity, deal with evil and suffering, reaffirm hope.

Woodhead and others have noted how many of the NHS’ original fathers were religious individuals who actively drew parallels between their new creation and Christianity, and that many early NHS hospitals inherited their buildings and nursing staff from nuns who had previously tended the sick. Unseen and unacknowledged compulsory State taxation replaced voluntary church tithes to pay for all this, with the incipient post-WWII welfare state essentially taking over Christianity’s old aspiration of caring for human souls “from cradle to grave,” as the old welfarist slogan went. 

Doctors caring for physical, biological bodies soon replaced priests caring for immaterial, spiritual bodies. The nation’s established church, the Church of England (CofE), even composed special prayers for such hallowed NHS staff, explicitly comparing them to Christ and His healing hands:

Lord Jesus, who healed the sick and gave them new life,
be with all carers and health professionals,
as they act as agents of your healing touch.
In desperate times, keep them strong yet loving;
and when their work is done,
be with them in their weariness and in their tears.
Amen.                                    

Remember, as that is aimed at “all carers and health professionals,” that will also include those who work at abortion clinics—and, given the passing of recent British “right to die” legislation, soon euthanasia providers too. Odd things for Christians to pray for. Essentially, the now terminally ill CofE was praying for its own de facto replacement institution here. 

Although criticizing the NHS has often been viewed as heresy in the U.K., over recent decades some critics have been more skeptical. In his poem “The Building,” English poet Philip Larkin spoke of how his local NHS hospital resembled a hideous, desacralized, post-modern church, whose bedside vases were filled with the “wasteful, weak propitiatory flowers” of patients and their families who somehow expected the State to cure them of all ills—a miracle which, “unless its powers/Outbuild cathedrals,” the structure, no matter how massive and expensively maintained, would be singularly unable to do.

Many NHS users today possess childishly naïve and overoptimistic expectations of just what it is the service can actually do, expecting it to miraculously solve all their problems just like that: not simply broken legs or weak hearts but empty souls too. Demand for NHS mental health services is currently shooting through the roof, with an incredible one in five British 16-year-old girls seeking such support in 2023, for example. 

Such ailments would often seem more spiritual maladies than physical ones, some of them inadvertently caused by the NHS itself in the first place. 

But spiritual maladies can only be cured by spiritual means, and State-backed worship of doctors seems a poor substitute for more traditional sources of spiritual sustenance like religion, art, poetry, culture, and faith. If I had a physical illness, I would book in to see an NHS doctor. But if I had a spiritual malaise, I may be better advised to follow routes like that once followed by Jack Traynor all those years ago.

Anatole France was once unimpressed by nineteenth-century Lourdes crutches. I personally am equally as unimpressed by certain contemporary NHS ones.

[Image: John “Jack” Traynor]