Seeing is Believing? The Form and Substance of French Medical Debates over Lourdes

Szabo, Jason "Seeing is Believing? The Form and Substance of French Medical Debates over Lourdes"Bulletin of the History of Medicine - Volume 76, Number 2, Summer 2002, pp. 199-230 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Abstract
Recent works on Lourdes have tended to emphasize the positive personal, social, and spiritual aspects of a pilgrimage, while downplaying the role of religious politics in (over)determining discussions around the events taking place there over the course of the Third Republic. This paper seeks to reassert the extent to which the medical community remained divided, along religious lines, over the existence and nature of the cures taking place at Lourdes well into the twentieth century, while analyzing how Catholic physicians were able to create an aura of therapeutic credibility around the cures