THE LOURDES CURES.*
Mn. MATTHEW ARNOLD, in the new preface to his Literature and Dogma, says with that air of authority which suits his manner so well, and his critical principles so ill, that the fatal objection to miracles is that they do not occur. Whether they occur or not depends, we suppose, very much on what the true definition of a miracle should be ; but that events all but indistinguishable from what the Christian world used to regard as miracles, occur in considerable number, and in connection with almost every description of faith and want of faith, would be, in the judgment of the present writer, the conch:if:don of any person of competent judgment who had given his mind to the impartial investiga.- tion of the subject, without any sort of bias either in favour of or against them. Take the present volume. Of the five cures here related, reputed to be miraculous by the subjects of them, and given with the full names and testimonies of all concerned, probably four would be considered by most medical men to be explicable on principles consistent with the rejection of any miraculous factor in the cure. Nevertheless, they would certainly regard the cures narrated all very striking and extraordinary evidences of the curative power of hope and faith, especially as in all these cases a long time has since elapsed without any subsequent ebbing- away of the rush of nervous energy to which such cures are usually attributed, an ebbing-away usually expected by medical men in the case of such cures. We will give a brief account of the author's own cure, as an illustration of this class of cases, as it is one of unusual interest, because the experiment with the Lourdes water was suggested and urged on M. Henri Lasserre by a very eminent Protestant, who has since been Les Episodes Miraculeus de Lourdes. Par Henri Lasserre. Paris: Societe Generale de Librairie Catholique, Victor Palme Directeur-Generale. 18E33. the Prime Minister of the French Republic, M. de Freycinet. In September, 1862, M. Henri Lasserre had so far lost his eye- eight from some affection which the Paris specialists, M. Desmares and M. Giraud-Teulon, attributed to hypertrophy of the optic nerve, that he could not read three or four lines of the largest print without an excessive fatigue in the upper part of the eyes, which rendered it quite impossible for him to continue. He was recommended to try douches of cold water on the eye- ball (prunelle), cupping on the nape of the neck, various other forms of water treatment, and alcoholic lotions, all of which were of no use whatever. It was when he had been deprived for nearly three months of the use of his sight for all reading purposes that he received in September, 1862, this note from M. de Freycinet (the Prime Minister of 1882), in answer to a letter dictated, but not written by himself :— " DIV DEAR FRIEND,—YOUT few lines have given me pleasure, but as I have already said to you, I long for a sight of your handwriting. This last few days, on returning from Cauterots, I passed Lourdes (near Tarbes); I visited there the celebrated Grotto, and I heard of such marvellous things in the way of cures pro- duced by its waters, principally in cases of diseases of the sight, that I press upon you very seriously to try them. If I were a Catholic and a believer like yon, and if I were ill, I should not hesitate to try this chance. If it be true that some sick persons have been suddenly cured, you may very fairly hope to increase their number ; and if that is not true, what do you risk in making trial of the waters ? I add that I have a little personal interest in the experiment. If it were to succeed, what an important fact it would be for me to record! I should be in presence of a miracle, or at least an event of which the principal witness would be beyond all suspicion. Adieu, my dear friend; give me news of yourself, and arrange for me to see you soon.
—Your old friend, (signed,) C. DE FREYCINET."
M. Henri Lasserre was not willing to make the experiment, and in a subsequent talk with H. de Freycinet and his sister, he told them the reason very frankly. It was not, he said, that
he fedred failure, it was rather that he feared success., "A. miracle of that kind, of which I myself were the object, would impose on me the obligation to give up everything, and to be- come a saint; it would be a terrible responsibility, and I am so much of a coward that it makes me tremble. With a physician, I should be quits for a little money; but if God cures me, what is it he will want of me ? That is horrid of me, is it not ? But such, unfortunately, is the pusillanimity of my heart. You suppose my faith faltering? You imagine that I fear to see the miracle not succeeding ? Undeceive yourselves, I am afraid of its succeeding ?" M. de Freycinet's reply was very wise and manly. "You are not less obliged to be virtuous now than you would be as a consequence of the miracle. And besides, even if your cure were brought about by the agency of a physician, that would be just as much God's gift, and your scruples would have just as much right to raise their voice against your weak- nesses or your passions." Nothing could be more reason- able than M. de Freycinet's view, and it is clear that it was his importunity which induced M. Henri Lasserre to make the experiment. M. de Freycinet wrote with his own hand the letter to the Curd of Lourdes, asking for the bottle of water with which the cure was to be attempted ; the letter was signed by M. Henri Lasserre, and of this letter we have a photograph given us in these pages. The cure was sudden and complete, though there was some threat of a relapse, which M. Henri Lasserre ascribed to a conscious moral failure of his own,
following directly upon the cure,—a threat of relapse which was averted, as he believes, by the prayers of H. Dupont, and his own penitence for his fault. Twenty years have elapsed, and H. Lasserre, who has become the historian of the Lourdes wonders, has never found his eyesight fail him again. The cure will, we doubt not, be ascribed by physicians in general to the directly curative effect of faith on nervous diseases,—and perhaps that is M. de Freycinet's own view of the case, as it certainly did not make him a Catholic,—but though the disease was by no means one of those which would be thought beyond the reach of the influence of a great act of faith on the nerves, the story of the Protestant's earnestness in making M. Lassen.° try the experiment, and the great eminence of that Protestant both as a scientific man and as politician, makes it especially inter.
eating to the readers of this volume. The one cure here described, which will, to most medical men, appear to be quite beyond the reach of anything like a stimulus given to the nervous powers by faith and hope, is the account of the cure of a carpenter of Lavanr (a town some forty miles from Toulouse). This man was cured of an exceedingly aggra- vated case of varicose veins, of thirty years' standing. Three medical certificates are given of the condition of this carpenter's varicose veins, which we will translate :—
"I, the undersigned, declare that for about thirty years Mr. Francis Macary, carpenter, had been suffering from varicose veins in the legs. These varicose veins, which were of the thickness of a finger, and complicated with de cordons noueux et flexueux tres-developpes,' compelled him to wear up to the present time a regular com- pression ('one compression methodique '), exerted partly by means of twisted bandages, partly by means of dog-skin stockings. In spite of these precautions, ulcers frequently showed themselves on both legs, and whenever they did, compelled complete repose and a long course of treatment. I have visited him to-day, and although his under limbs were stripped of all clothing, I have only been able to discover a few traces of these enormous varicose veins. This case of spontaneous cure appears to me all the more surprising, that the annals of science record not a single fact of this nature.—(Signed), St:GUR, Doctor of Medicine, Member of the Mutual-Aid Society of Saint Louis, Lavaur, August 16th, 1871."
The second certificate is as follows :— " I, the undersigned, certify that for about thirty years Mr. Macary, carpenter, of Layout., has been attacked by varicose veins with enormous nodosities in the legs, frequently complicated by large ulcers, in spite of the compression exerted by appropriate stockings or bandages, that these symptoms have disappeared suddenly, and that to-day there only remains a nodosity, sensibly diminished, in the inner and upper part of the right leg.—Lavaur, August 25th, 1871 (Signed), Rossicxot, Doctor of Medicine."
The third medical certificate is as follows :— " Francois literary, sixty years old, carpenter, of Lavaur, member of the Society of Saint Louis, consulted us about twenty years ago for varicose veins, which filled up the left popliteal hollow and inside of the knee and of the leg. We then observed towards the lower third part of this limb a varicose ulcer' with thickened edges, with considerable and painful engorgement of the tissues. There was besides, both in and outside the upper part of the calf, two large old scars, which had nothing to do with the affection for which we were consulted, and which were the result of a gunshot received by the patient twenty years previously. There were so many emlarged veins, and they were enlarged to so great an extent, that so far as we were con- -corned, the surgical means with which one treats this disease were formally contra-indicated. Macary appeared to us to be the victim of an infirmity which would last him his life, and we advised only pallia- tives which several of our brethren had already advised. Eighteen years later,—that is, two years ago,—Macary presented himself to consult us again. The state of his leg had grown much worse. We confirmed our former prognostic, and told him it was of urgent necessity for him to get the ulcer to cicatrise' to submit himself, as the only means, to absolute and prolonged rest in bed, and to the application of regular dressings. To-day, August 15th, 1871, Macary appears for the third time. The ulcer is perfectly cicatrised. There is nothing compressing the leg, and nevertheless there does not exist the shadow of engorgement. What surprises us, above all, is that the varicose knots (paquets) have entirely disappeared ; and that where they were before, one can feel some small strings, hard, empty of blood, and yielding under the pressure of the fingers. The interior saphene vein has its normal direction and volume. The most attentive examination affords no trace of a surgical operation. According to the account of Macary, this radical cure was produced in the course of a single night, and under the influence of nothing but the applica- tion of some compressors wetted by water drawn from the Grotto of Lourdes. We conclude that, apart from Macary's story, science is impotent to explain this fact ; for [medical] authors give us no experience of anything at all similar. They are all unanimons on this point, that varicose veins, left to themselves, are incurable ; that they are not cured by palliatives, and still less spontaneously ; that they go on getting worse steadily, and that one can only hope for any radical cure by the application of surgical means which involve grave dangers to the patients. And though the fact asserted by Macary would not be proved by evidence taken from any one else, still it would not the less remain for us a fact of the most extraordinary kind, and—let us say it out plainly—a supernatural fact. In which faith we sign the contents of the present report.—BERET, M.D. of the Faculty of Paris, August 15th, 1871."
Macary's story was, that having been himself a cruel sufferer for the greater part of his life, and an unbeliever in Christianity too, he was immensely struck in his sufferings by the story of the Lourdes cures, that he procured a bottle of the Lourdes water, shied his bandages and stockings into the corner of the room, saying he should never want them again, applied the water freely to his legs, went to sleep at once, woke up to call out to his wife that he was cured, but was immediately overpowered by sleep once more, and in the morning found all the varicose veins and knots on his leg entirely gone. He got up early to his work, as he had not done for a great number of years, and he was found there by his astonished son. The sequel of the story is itself curious. He lived for four years without any return of his disease, but then died suddenly at the age of sixty-four from aneurism, i.e., we conjecture,—for we speak by no medical authority,—through the internal swelling of a vein or artery of a kind closely allied to that which had caused him such prolonged suffering when it occurred in the external veins.
We will not say that this is a miracle, for we find evidence of wonders of this kind in too many directions to be sure that events of this kind, even if they are authentic, happen through any specially divine force,—which is, we suppose, the sine quit non of a miracle,—but we do say that it is a statement of a kind which Mr. Arnold is bound to consider, before he decides so coolly that the defect of miracles is that they do not occur.
We shall be asked what moral impression the volume as a whole makes upon us. First, M. Lasserre, the author, writes with much too rhetorical an air, and is neither so simple nor so manly in his narrative as to give us the idea of the higher kind of piety. But M. de Freycinet's testimony proves him to be a man of honour, and he appears to have taken great pains to get everything at first-hand. As to the religious atmosphere of the book, it is certainly not such as to suit English piety. Undoubtedly, the worship of the Virgin does seem in this book to have almost replaced the worship of God ; and undoubtedly, too, there is an air of pettiness about the re- ligious detail ;—the importance attached to wearing the Virgin's colours, for instance, as if she were to be gained over by small etiquettes, and a very great many details of the same kind. None the less, the book seems to us, though certainly, not to justify, still to explain, a remark which was once attributed to Professor Huxley,—namely, that if he could accept at all the class of events which go under the generic name of" miracles," he should certainly cite, as those having the best external evidence, not the miracles of Christianity, but the miracles of Lourdes.
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