Did the Miracles at Lourdes Really Happen?

Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code wasn’t the first historical fiction where the history was just as fictional as the story. Émile Zola beat Brown by over a hundred years.

Zola was a famous French writer and avowed atheist whose novels and other works had won popular acclaim. In 1892, he decided to write a novel about the amazing cures said to be taking place in the waters of a spring in Lourdes, France, where the Virgin Mary had reportedly appeared to young Bernadette Soubirous eighteen times during 1858.

The steady stream of astonishing healings led to the establishment in 1883 of the Lourdes Medical Bureau (Bureau des Constatations Médicales), where medical experts could properly examine and document healings. Still in existence, the Bureau prides itself on its objectivity, and its office is open to all qualified physicians and medical experts regardless of their religious views. It was during Dr. Gustave Boissarie’s tenure as head of the Bureau that our hostile witness made his visit.

Zola’s decision to write a novel about the healings at Lourdes caused immense excitement in the press, especially when he visited the shrine where they took place during a national pilgrimage to Lourdes in 1892. Surrounded by the press and politicians, Zola inspected the medical bureau, interviewed the sick as well as those who were healed, and made sketches for the characters in his book. Three persons who had experienced healings made it into Zola’s novel under different names. Titled Lourdes, it was published in 1894.

TESTIMONY

There were about fifty of them altogether, many of them leaning on walls. A half dozen, however were seated at tables . . . a Father of the Assumption and three young seminarians who acted as secretaries . . . the onlookers consisted almost entirely of inquisitive people and witnesses, including a score of doctors and a few priests. The medical men, who had come from all parts, mostly preserved silence, only a few of them asked a question; and every now and then they would exchange oblique glances, more occupied apparently in watching one another than in verifying the facts submitted to their examination. Who could they be? Some names were mentioned, but they were quite unknown. Only one had caused any stir, that of a celebrated doctor, professor at a Catholic university.

COMMENT

As Zola describes it, the Lourdes Medical Bureau’s staff hardly seems impressive. In fact, it comes off as a rag-tag group of nobodies with questionable credentials. But Dr. Gustave Boissarie, who was present during Zola’s visit, states that the writer’s description was grossly and perhaps deliberately inaccurate. According to Boissarie, “During the 1892 national pilgrimage, over fifty doctors witnessed our investigations. On the day Zola visited us, there was in our room, a Paris hospital surgeon, corresponding members of the Academy of Medicine, former and actual Paris hospital surgeons, doctors from our large cities, from our principal hot water resorts, and from foreign universities.”

Dr. Boissarie also notes that Zola’s misrepresentation was based only on the two hours he spent at the Bureau, during which “he did not take a single note or follow a single one of the cures he witnessed; he did not make a single inquiry.”

TESTIMONY

I will admit that I came across some instances of real cure. Many cases of nervous disorders have undoubtedly been cured, and there have also been other cures which may, perhaps be attributed to errors of diagnosis on the part of doctors who attended the patients so cured. Often a patient is described by his doctor as suffering from consumption. He goes to Lourdes, and is cured. However, the probability is that the doctor made a mistake. In my own case I was at one time suffering from a violent pain in my chest, which presented all the symptoms of angina pectoris, a mortal malady. It was nothing of the sort. Indigestion, doubtless, and, as such, curable.

HOSTILE WITNESS

Zola, despite his obvious skepticism, is compelled to admit that he did witness real cures at Lourdes. It’s worth exploring his speculations about how these cures happened so as to highlight a certain dogmatic blindness on his part to the possibility of miracles.

If people are cured at Lourdes, Zola speculates, it must be because their sicknesses were psychosomatic (i.e., nervous disorders) or the sick person was originally misdiagnosed. Fair enough. Even well-trained physicians can misdiagnose an illness in its early stages, as was the case with Zola’s being misdiagnosed for his indigestion. But recognizing a serious illness in its late stages doesn’t require much expertise. Ordinary people can tell when someone is dying.

Zola’s example of consumption (tuberculosis) as a commonly misdiagnosed illness is interesting because one of the characters in his book, a woman he named La Grivotte, was dying from it. Zola based La Grivotte’s condition on the real-life cure that he witnessed of a consumptive woman named Marie Wuiplier Labranchu (1874-1920). Labranchu had been diagnosed at a hospital with acute pulmonary tuberculosis with softening of the lungs and cavities. By the time she arrived at Lourdes, her illness was in its late stages. She had been bedridden for ten months, could not keep food down, and weighed only sixty pounds, having lost forty-eight. Her condition was obviously grave. Zola knew this because he describes Labranchu (“La Grivotte”) in his book as follows:

La Grivotte, hitherto stretched out, scarce breathing, like a corpse, had just raised herself up in front of M. Sabathier. She was a tall, slip-shod, singular-looking creature of over thirty, with a round, ravaged face, which her frizzy hair and flaming eyes rendered almost pretty. She had reached the third stage of phthisis. . . . [“La Grivotte” later states that] “the doctors say that I have one lung done for, and that the other one is scarcely any better. There are great big holes you know. At first I only felt bad between the shoulders and spat up some froth. But then I got thin, and became a dreadful sight. And now I'm always in a sweat, and cough till I think I’m going to bring my heart up. And I can no longer spit. And I haven’t the strength to stand, you see. I can’t eat.”

One could hardly dismiss La Grivotte/Labranchu’s symptoms as the product of a nervous disorder or indigestion. After her bath at Lourdes, Zola describes a near-instantaneous and radical change in her health:

Pierre looked at her, this time quite stupefied. Was this the same girl whom, on the previous night, he had seen lying on the carriage seat, annihilated, coughing and spitting blood, with her face of ashen hue? He could not recognize her as she now stood there, erect and slender, her cheeks rosy, her eyes sparkling, unbuoyed by a determination to live, a joy in living already.

What accounts for this radical healing? Zola answers in his book that it wasn’t a cure at all. La Grivotte soon relapses and dies while insanely crying out “I am cured, I am cured, completely cured!” Zola (represented by the journalist Pierre) ponders in the novel, “Was this, then, some special case of phthisis complicated by neurosis? Or was it some other malady, some unknown disease, quietly continuing its work in the midst of contradictory diagnosis?” All of these speculations make up little more than an atheistic sermon for the reader. None of it can be applied to the actual case from which Zola created La Grivotte.

Mary Labranchu didn’t relapse nor did she soon die. She lived a long, healthy life after her cure at Lourdes. Zola knew this because in 1895, a year after his novel was published and three years after Labranchu’s cure, he wrote to Labranchu offering to relocate her and her husband in Belgium, all expenses paid. One can only speculate as to why Zola made this offer. It may be that Zola feared that Labranchu’s living in France in continued good health might hurt book sales.

TESTIMONY

I am the absolute master of my personages. I make her live or die to suit my pleasure. Mrs. Labranchu, being healed, has no ground to complain. I don’t believe in miracles, anyhow; should I see all the sick get well instantaneously, I would not believe any more.

COMMENT

When Dr. Boissarie confronted Zola about “killing” La Grivotte in the novel when her real-life model, Mary Labranchu, remained alive and never relapsed, Zola replied as above. His remarks underscore the danger of historical novels, especially when the author does not respect the subject matter. Even though La Grivotte had been based on a real person, the author misrepresented real-life events to suit his purpose, even if it meant tarnishing and impugning the reputation of Lourdes, its Medical Bureau, and the individuals he portrayed in his story.

HOSTILE WITNESS

The last line of Zola’s response is among the most famous things he ever wrote. “I don’t believe in miracles. . . . should I see all the sick get well instantaneously, I would not believe any more.”

Zola’s biased view is in stark contrast to that of the Medical Bureau staff that he attacks. To this day, the Bureau investigates purported healings impartially, and its conclusions are based on the evidence.

Although hundreds, perhaps thousands, of healings have occurred in connection with Lourdes, very few pass the rigorous examination of the Bureau. Most of the people who are healed never bother to officially report their healing to the Bureau, and those who do report it are often rejected because they don’t have the proper documentation to establish their original ailment.

Even those who report their healing with proper documentation can be ruled out if their healing can be possibly be attributed to some natural cause. If a healing does pass the scrutiny of the Medical Bureau, the case is given to their bishop for his investigation.

So far, there have been only sixty-nine cases that have passed the scrutiny of the Bureau and the Church. Such studied skepticism is entirely missing in Zola’s case. As he himself stated, no evidence whatsoever could change his mind about miracles; that’s because his disbelief in their possibility was based solely on his a priori convictions. Zola’s atheism eclipsed the evidence, whereas the Lourdes Medical Bureau allowed the evidence to drive their conclusions.

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