Tuberculosis (inflammation of the lungs)
Peritonitis (the inflammation of the walls of the abdomen caused by inflammation of abdominal organs, perforated gallbladder, ruptured cyst, internal bleeding)
Leg and abdominal tumors (a swelling caused by uncontrolled and progressive new growth of tissue)
Dorsolumbar spondylitis (a degenerative change in the spine)
Blindness of cerebral origin
Bilateral optic atrophy (a wasting away of the optic nerve resulting in loss of vision and permanent blind spot in the center of the visual field)
Multiple sclerosis (the demyelization of the white matter of the brain and spinal cord resulting in paralysis)
Sarcoma of the pelvis (cancer of the hip)
Budd-Chiari syndrome (a circulatory system disorder involving closure or obstruction of blood vessels to the liver) (Murphy, 1992, p. 271).
Alex Carrel’s voyage to Lourdes. One of the most evocative accounts of spiritual healing that occurred at Lourdes is described by Dr. Alex Carrel in his 1903 book Voyage to Lourdes (Carrel, 1950). Dr. Carrel was a rationalist, a skeptic and a Nobel Laureate in medicine who, during a train trip to Lourdes, decided to personally observe a young woman named Marie Bailly whom he met on the train. On the verge of death and suffering from the last stages of tubercular peritonitis (inflammation of the lining of the walls of the abdominal and pelvic cavities), Dr. Carrel watched Marie slowly heal right before his eyes after only a few hours in the Grotto where Bernadette is reported to have seen her vision of the Virgin Mary. As a result of his experience at Lourdes, Carrel came away convinced that many of the cures at Lourdes were indeed authentic and could not solely be attributed to the power of suggestion or to the relief of mere functional (psychosomatic) disorders. Although he found it “distressingly unpleasant to be personally involved in a miracle,” he declared that “to say something is not true without having first investigated the facts is to commit a grave scientific error… it is also the duty of science not to reject things simply because they appear extraordinary or because science is powerless to explain them… The only thing that matters is to look at the facts” (Carrel, 1950, pp. 50-51).
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Birthmarks Suggestive of Reincarnation. In his two-volume, 2,080-page monograph titled Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects, Ian Stevenson (1997a), professor of psychiatry and director of the Division of Personality Studies at the Health Sciences Center at the University of Virginia, reports on 225 highly detailed case studies correlating birthmarks and other physiological manifestations (e.g., birth defect) with children’s experiences of remembered past life events, particularly violent death. A concise 240-page summary (including photographs) of 112 of those cases is provided by Stevenson in his book Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect (Stevenson, 1997b).
Why birthmark evidence is important to the case for reincarnation. Stevenson has collected over 2,600 reported cases of past-life memories of which 85 detailed reports have been published. Children who claim to remember a previous life have been found all over the world: many in Hindu and Buddhist countries of South Asia, Shiite peoples of Lebannon and Turkey, and indigenous tribes of West Africa and northwestern North America; fewer in Europe, the United States, and Canada. Stevenson (1997b) asserts that cases involving birthmarks (that differ noticeably from the kind of birthmark that almost everyone has) and birth defects are especially important for the following three reasons (pp.2-3):
1. The birthmarks and birth defects provide an objective type of evidence well above that which depends on the fallible memories of informants. “For many of the cases, we have a medical document, usually a port-mortem report, that gives us a written confirmation of the correspondence between the birthmark (or birth defect) and the wound on the deceased person whose life the child, when it can speak, will usually claim to remember” (Stevenson, 1997b, p. 2).
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