In April 1987 hematologist and medical historian Jacalyn Duffin was asked to provide an expert medical opinion on a set of bone marrow samples that later proved to concern the prolonged second remission of acute myelogenous leukemia in the case of LN, a Roman Catholic who had prayed for divine intercession to Mère Marie-Marguerite d'Youville, the founder of the Grey Nuns of Montreal. LN's medical records and Dr. Duffin's testimomy were among the evidence presented to the Vatican in the cause of the canonization of Marguerite d'Youville. In an article published in December 1997 in Saturday Night magazine, Dr. Duffin reflected on the strange case of LN and the making of Canada's first saint.
Throughout this adventure, I kept thinking that miracles were harder and harder to come by in this age of technology, scepticism, and speed. Surely, the Church was vexed by the relative subordination of theology in the saintly decision-making process to a committee of medical professionals whose very language was constructed to reduce experience to molecules and probabilities. Now, I am far less certain.
A miracle is something that exceeds our expectations, that defies the “rules” — be they medical or spiritual — constructed by humans to identify, label, and comprehend our experiences. LN continues in miraculously good health seven years after our journey to Rome, but had she been healed of fever and bruising 200 years ago, no-one would have seen a miracle. Leukaemia had not yet been recognized and the medical rules for diagnosing it had not been developed — nor had its dismal survival rates been defined.
Historians know that diseases are only metaphysical entities. In a sense they are merely theories about illness, which tend to favour objective, passive explanations at the expense of the subjective and active stories of people. In fact, the "invention" of a disease, along with other inventions like microscopes and blood smears, opens up a whole new realm of previously unimagined possibilities for miracles. … On my lengthy journey to St. Peter's Basilica I may not have been converted to formal religion, but I was brought to acknowledge a truth -— a truth that I had previously managed to avoid. A miracle simply falls outside the honestly made and well-established boundaries of what two radically different sets of human rules teach us to expect. Since there is no limit to the diversity of our existence, miracles can happen every day.
Excerpted with permission of the author from Duffin J. Medical miracle. Saturday Night 1997;112(10):29-42.