Expectation, Suggestion & the Placebo Response

In the summer of 1518, a woman began dancing in a Strasbourg street and could not stop; within weeks, dozens were dancing with her, for days on end. The city council's first remedy was to build stages and hire musicians so the afflicted could dance it out — and the outbreak grew worse.

Annabel Beam, a Texas nine-year-old who had spent most of her childhood under specialist care for two incurable digestive motility disorders, fell about 30 feet headfirst into the hollow trunk of a cottonwood tree in December 2011 and was lifted out essentially uninjured five hours later. In the months that followed her symptoms were gone; Boston Children's Hospital eventually released her from gastroenterology care, her treating specialist confirmed the resolution on the record, and the story became the book and 2016 film Miracles from Heaven.

Four stone stelae erected at the sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidaurus in the fourth century BCE record roughly seventy cures — blindness, paralysis, muteness, a five-year pregnancy — reported by pilgrims who slept in the sanctuary's dormitory and dreamed of the god. The inscriptions are the largest surviving body of healing claims from the ancient world, and they were composed and displayed by the sanctuary whose reputation they served.

Fed through a tube since he was eleven months old, sixteen-year-old Chris Gunderson was at a Virginia prayer service when a man placed his hands on his abdomen and prayed. He described something like electricity passing from his shoulder through his stomach — and that evening he ate a full meal, a thing he had never once done.

In the final book of City of God (c. 426 CE), Augustine of Hippo compiled approximately seventy attested miracle accounts from his own diocese, presenting them as evidence that miracles had not ceased with the apostolic age.

Augustine personally witnessed and documented the healing of Paulus, a Cappadocian man afflicted with convulsions, at the shrine of St. Stephen in Hippo c. 425 CE, and days later the healing of his sister Palladia at the same altar.

Over four decades of mass crusades across Africa, Reinhard Bonnke reported millions of conversions and thousands of healings, but independent medical verification of specific cases has never been published, and skeptical analysis identifies a pattern of unsubstantiated claims.

Beginning in 1727, pilgrims at the tomb of Jansenist deacon Francois de Paris in the Saint-Medard cemetery reported miraculous cures and fell into violent convulsions; the phenomenon attracted thousands and became David Hume's chosen test case for miracle testimony.

Beginning in 1981, several students at a school in Kibeho, Rwanda, reported Marian apparitions that included visions of mass violence and rivers of blood — interpreted after the 1994 Rwandan genocide as prophetic.

On September 19, 1846, two young French shepherd children reported a weeping apparition on a mountain near La Salette who delivered a message of penance; the event was approved by the Church in 1851 but subsequently complicated by the visionaries' divergent later claims.

A French man with six years of recurring right-sided paralysis and vision loss from bilateral carotid artery disorders felt sudden warmth and complete recovery at Lourdes in 1970 — recognized in 1978 but disputed by American neurologists.

Sister Bernadette Moriau had worn orthopedic braces and taken morphine for a twisted lower body since the 1960s — four spinal operations behind her, a wheelchair beneath her. One July evening in 2008, home from a pilgrimage to Lourdes, she felt a warmth move through her — and that night she reached down and took the braces off.

At the 1903 canonization of Seraphim of Sarov, attended by 200,000 including Tsar Nicholas II, numerous healings were reported at the translation of his relics — even though the pre-canonization commission had found the body was NOT incorrupt.

A prospective peer-reviewed study by Indiana University researchers measured statistically significant improvements in hearing and vision in 24 Mozambican subjects following proximal intercessory prayer.

Irish faith healer Valentine Greatrakes toured England in 1666, reportedly curing scrofula, epilepsy, and other conditions by stroking; his practice was observed and partially endorsed by Royal Society fellows including Robert Boyle.