Karen’s mother recalled, “When we saw no improvement from the first brace, we changed doctors. Karen was four months old then. We took her to another orthopedist who was recommended to us. He immediately put her in a cast that encased the whole leg and left it on for a month. She cried almost constantly. When they took the cast off, the leg flopped back exactly as it had been before. The doctor let her go about a month and then tried another cast. More crying almost day and night. And when he took off that cast, the leg promptly went back into its twisted position” (Spraggett 1970, pp. 77–78).
The orthopedist told the Georges that when their daughter was two and a half years old, she could have surgery. But the Georges did not want to wait that long. And they did not have faith in the operations. Mrs. George said, “We met other parents with children who had the same problem in the doctor’s waiting room and they told us of repeated operations, and sometimes after years of treatment the child was still deformed. We knew, too, from talking to other parents and seeing their children that Karen’s was a very serious case” (Spraggett 1970, p. 79).
Having heard of Kathryn Kuhlman, the Georges brought their daughter to one of her meetings. Kuhlman and her congregation prayed for Karen’s healing. Within two days, the lump on Karen’s foot was gone. Spraggett (1970, p. 80) said, “Karen George received no further medical treatment for her foot. Her mother took her to Kathryn Kuhlman’s miracle services regularly. Over a period of a month the child’s foot imperceptibly improved until one day Mrs. George examined it and it was perfectly normal.” When Karen was twenty years old, Spraggett (1970, p. 80) visited her and personally observed her perfectly normal foot.Sometimes miraculous healings occur in connection not only with living humans, but with humans long departed, as in the case of healings by departed saints. John Fagan, a dock worker in Glasgow, Scotland, underwent such a cure (Rogo 1982, pp. 266–271). On April 26, 1967, the middle-aged Fagan found himself vomiting blood. He entered the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, and underwent medical testing, which showed he had stomach cancer. The doctors, without telling him he had cancer, recommended surgery. Rogo (1982, p. 267) stated, “The resulting surgery revealed that the cancer had eaten through the stomach and into the transverse colon. The stomach was greatly ulcerated, and the cancer had apparently spread far by the time of the operation. The cancerous tissue could not be completely removed, and the doctors duly advised Mrs. Fagan that her husband had only from six months to a year to live. Again, Fagan was not told of this prognosis.” Fagan was released from the hospital, and as predicted, his condition grew worse. He went back into the hospital on December 21, 1967. Doctors informed Mrs. Fagan that inoperable secondary tumors had developed. There was nothing they could do for Mr. Fagan other than give him medications to reduce the pain he was suffering. Mrs. Fagan cared for her husband at home. He remained in bed, getting weaker as he approached death. A Catholic priest, Father John Fitzgibbon, of the Church of Blessed John Ogilvie, started visiting the Fagans, who were Catholic. Expecting the worst, Father Fitzgibbon gave Fagan the last rites. As a last hope, he gave Mrs. Fagan a medal of Blessed John Ogilvie, a Scottish Catholic martyr killed by Glasgow Protestants in 1614, and suggested she pray to him. Mrs. Fagan followed the priest’s advice. Friends of the Fagan’s would also come and pray to Blessed John Ogilvie. Rogo (1982, p. 268) states, “By March, Fagan was so weak that he could neither get up from bed, eat, or even talk. He could only vomit repeatedly, since by now his stomach was literally dissolving itself. . . . The Fagans’ doctor, Archibald MacDonald, arrived . . . [March 6] . . . and was so shaken by his patient’s condition that he could do nothing but advise Mrs. Fagan that he would return after the weekend to sign the death certificate. He gave her husband a pain killer and left. Fagan then fell into a deep sleep.” The next day, Fagan’s condition changed completely. His pain and vomiting stopped, and he felt hungry. Dr. MacDonald was astounded by the recovery, which was soon complete.
When Fagan’s miraculous cure became known, Catholic Church officials in Scotland hoped to use it to convince the Vatican to take the final step in canonizing John Ogilvie as a saint. In order to accomplish this, the Church officials had to extensively document Fagan’s cure. They convened a panel headed by Father Thomas Reilly. This panel obtained an account of the case from Dr. MacDonald, and then chose a committee composed of three Glasgow doctors to investigate further. After two years’ study, the committee could find no medical explanation for the cure. In 1971, the Vatican sent Dr. Livio Capacaccia, an expert on diseases of the stomach and intestines at the University of Rome, to Scotland. Although Dr. Capacaccia was inclined to believe Fagan’s cure was miraculous, Father Reilly encouraged him to carefully consider possible natural explanations for the cure. Dr. Capacaccia made some proposals, which were studied by the committee. For example, he proposed that perhaps the secondary cancerous growths had undergone spontaneous remission. The committee concluded that the medical evidence ruled this out. Another theory was that something other than secondary cancerous growths caused Fagan’s relapse. Along these lines, Dr. Gerard Crean, an expert on diseases of the stomach and intestines from Edinburgh, suggested that the original operation had removed all the cancerous growths, and that Fagan’s relapse had been caused by discharge from an abscess that later healed itself. Rogo (1982, p. 270) states, “Crean’s theory was finally rejected on the basis that (1) Fagan was too near death to have been suffering from a simple abscess; (2) the original surgeon was ready to confirm that not all of Fagan’s cancer had been removed during the surgery; and (3) Fagan’s decline was consistent with his doctor’s original diagnosis and prognosis. The panel could find no alternative explanation and concluded that Fagan was suffering from a secondary malignant cancer that had—for no apparent medical reason—suddenly healed of its own accord.”
In May 1971, Fagan underwent thorough medical testing at Western General Hospital in Edinburgh. The examiners concluded that Fagan’s relapse was “entirely consistent with the natural history of a patient with recurrent gastric carcinoma” and that there was “no satisfactory explanation” for his cure (Rogo 1982, p. 270). Dr. Capacaccia returned to Glasgow in October 1971 and reviewed all of the medical evidence in consultation with the doctors involved in the investigation. He found that the cure was miraculous and reported his conclusion to the Vatican. Pope Paul VI declared the cure a miracle caused by John Ogilvie, who was soon thereafter declared a saint.
Postmortem healings also took place in connection with St. Martin de Porres of Peru, who was born in 1579 and died in 1639. The Catholic process of declaring sainthood goes in two main stages. The first is beatification and the second is canonization. The beatification of St. Martin de Porres came in 1837. His canonization came in 1857. In connection with the beatification process, Pope Gregory XV on March 19, 1836 approved the following cure as miraculous. A woman in Lima broke a piece of pottery, and a sliver entered her eyeball, causing all the fluid to leak out. This injury left the eye incurably blind. Rogo (1982, p. 265) stated, “The master of a nearby monastery, however, sent the woman a small bone fragment, a relic of Martin de Porres, and instructed her to hold it to the damaged eye. She did as she was directed and woke the next morning to find her eye and sight totally restored. Though this was medically impossible, the cure was authenticated by the woman’s own doctor, who had examined the original wound.” The second cure connected with the beatification of St. Martin of Porres also took place in Lima. A Peruvian child fell eighteen feet from a balcony and split his skull. The child went into convulsions. A doctor looked at him and found his case hopeless. The child’s mother, and the Spanish noblewoman who employed her, prayed to Martin de Porres, and after the hours, the child got up from bed, having recovered completely. Two more recent cures were recognized by the Vatican in 1962. In 1948, Dorothy Caballero Escalante, an elderly woman in Paraguay, was suffering from an inoperable intestinal blockage. Her daughter, having been informed that her mother was near death, prayed to Martin de Porres, and she recovered fully. In 1956, Anthony Cabrera Perez, a boy four years old, was playing in a construction site in Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. A large block of cement fell on his leg, crushing it. Gangrene later infected the leg. Doctors at St. Eulalia’s Hospital treated it with medicine, which failed to act.The doctors then decided to amputate the leg to save the boy’s life. But the parents prayed to Martin of Porres, and the next morning the gangrene was gone and the boy’s leg soon healed.