Kathryn Kuhlman's Spinal Cancer Healing (Nolen Follow-up)

Kathryn Kuhlman (1907–1976) was one of the most prominent healing evangelists in mid-20th-century America, drawing thousands to her "miracle services" in Pittsburgh and beyond. Her ministry claimed large numbers of healings, and she had genuine public reach — appearing on Johnny Carson, publishing books, and collaborating with major television networks.

In 1973, surgeon William A. Nolen MD attended a Kuhlman fellowship in Philadelphia and identified 23 attendees who reported being cured. He spent two years tracking them down. His 1974 book documents what he found: not one person with confirmed organic disease showed evidence of cure. The most striking case involved a woman said to be healed of spinal cancer who threw away her back brace and ran across the stage; her spine collapsed the next day, and she died four months later.

Nolen's critique was methodologically limited — he attended only one service and could not verify the baseline diagnoses of all 23 claimants. Defenders noted that this sampling was too narrow. His central finding stands: no organic cure was independently confirmed, and at least one patient was arguably harmed by the dramatic staging of her supposed healing.

Kuhlman herself acknowledged in a 1974 interview that she did not know why some were healed and others were not, and she was reportedly disturbed by Nolen's book. The case remains the most-cited skeptical investigation of a major Protestant healing ministry, and it set the template for subsequent medical scrutiny of charismatic healers.