Faith & Healing

Modern scientific medicine is defeating itself. What the patient wants is not so much impersonal, technical skill as reassuring personal contact with a healer. As a result, faith healers, instead of fading away as science improves its knowledge and methods, are multiplying all around. These were the conclusions reached by 40 assorted scientists attending the International Congress of Parapsychology at Saint-Paul in Southern France.

Does It Really Work? As they headed for home last week after ten days of contemplation and discussion among the terraced vineyards of Provence, the delegates were agreed that they must find out, by cold scientific investigations, more about the occult arts. There was no doubt that a fertile field lay before them. Author Maurice Colinon had investigated faith healers in France for eight years--first as a newspaperman, then posing successively as a healer, front man for an Oriental fakir, and a mortally sick man. His most startling report: "unorthodox" healers are now 48,000 strong and outnumber the country's 42,000 licensed physicians. They are also increasing rapidly east of the Rhine, a German delegate reported.

Do faith healers really heal? From a Harley Street specialist, Dr. Louis Rose, came a resounding no. He had checked hundreds of cures claimed for British faith healers and could find no evidence that they had any paranormal powers. Admittedly, some patients felt better, but this was a psychological reaction. Dr. Rose insisted, and there were no organic changes.

Some healers, at least, may have unusual powers, suggested Italy's Professor Emilio Servadio. Patients treated by the Mago di Napoli, who is raking in $4,000 a week in Rome (TIME, Feb. 23, 1953), always spoke of feeling a current of air when the healer raised his hands. So Servadio lured the Mago into a laboratory with concealed anemometers. He found to his amazement that when the Mago raised his hands, he displaced a column of air four feet across.

Tests Ahead. Though most delegates remained skeptical about the faith healers' methods, they were tolerant of their objective. Said Psychologist David van Lennep of Utrecht: "Healers are excessive egocentrics, while those who go to them have no communication with the outside world. When they go to a regular doctor, they are just put into a medicine factory." Jesuit Father Louis Beirnaert, a practicing psychoanalyst, complained: "We have spent too much time criticizing healers because they are not doctors and not enough time criticizing doctors who are not healers."

To aid the search for objective truths, Dr. Francois Leuret invited five parapsychologists to visit Lourdes in October. They will be able to check the grotto's "baffling" cures and give psychological tests to the cured.

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