Saintly ‘science’: When doctors and doubters are called upon to prove miracles

Dr. Jacalyn Duffin, a hematologist, lapsed Anglican and firm atheist, was desperate for work in the mid-1980s when she took on a small contract in Ottawa to interpret a set of laboratory slides for a colleague and write a report.

She was given no information about the patient and assumed her report would be used in a malpractice lawsuit, which is common for that kind of blind medical analysis.

Instead, her findings and subsequent oral testimony became the last piece of “evidence” of a miracle in the 200-year cause for canonization of Marie-Marguerite d’Youville, the first Canadian to be made a saint.

That an atheist scientist would be conscripted to the cause is not unusual in the complicated business of proving sainthood.

Dr. Ronald Kleinman, also an atheist, was a top pediatrician at Massachusetts General Hospital in March 1987 when he treated a little girl who was moments from death. The result of what he witnessed that day became critical medical evidence that led to Edith Stein being declared a saint...

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