The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [113]
There are countless reports in the world literature of exploration and anthropology not only of sicknesses being cured by faith in the healer, but also of people wasting away and dying when cursed by a sorcerer. A more or less typical example is told by Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, who with a few companions and under conditions of terrible privation wandered on land and sea, from Florida to Texas to Mexico in 1528-36. The many different communities of Native Americans he met longed to believe in the supernatural healing powers of the strange light-skinned, black-bearded foreigners and their black-skinned companion from Morocco, Este-banico. Eventually whole villages came out to meet them, depositing all their wealth at the feet of the Spaniards and humbly imploring cures. It began modestly enough:
[T]hey tried to make us into medicine men, without examining us or asking for credentials, for they cure illnesses by blowing on the sick person... and they ordered us to do the same and be of some use... The way in which we cured was by making the sign of the cross over them and blowing on them and reciting a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria... [A]s soon as we made the sign of the cross over them, all those for whom we prayed told the others that they were well and healthy...
Soon they were curing cripples. Cabeza de Vaca reports he raised a man from the dead. After that,
we were very much hampered by the large number of people who were following us ... their eagerness to come and touch us was very great and their importunity so extreme that three hours would pass without our being able to persuade them to leave us alone.
When a tribe begged the Spaniards not to leave them, Cabeza de Vaca and his companions became angry. Then,
a strange thing happened... [M]any of them fell ill, and eight men died the next day. All over the land, in the places where this became known, they were so afraid of us that it seemed that the very sight of us made them almost die of fear. They implored us not to be angry, nor to wish for any more of them to die; and they were altogether convinced that we killed them simply by wishing to.
In 1858, an apparition of the Virgin Mary was reported in Lourdes, France; the Mother of God confirmed the dogma of her immaculate conception which had been proclaimed by Pope Pius IX just four years earlier. Something like a hundred million people have come to Lourdes since then in the hope of being cured, many with illnesses that the medicine of the time was helpless to defeat. The Roman Catholic Church rejected the authenticity of large numbers of claimed miraculous cures, accepting only sixty-five in nearly a century and a half (of tumours, tuberculosis, opthalmitis, impetigo, bronchitis, paralysis and other diseases, but not, say, the regeneration of a limb or a severed spinal cord). Of the sixty-five, women outnumber men ten to one. The odds of a miraculous cure at Lourdes, then, are about one in a million; you are roughly as likely to recover after visiting Lourdes as you are to win the lottery, or to die in the crash of a randomly selected regularly scheduled airplane flight -including the one taking you to Lourdes.
The spontaneous remission rate of all cancers, lumped together, is estimated to be something between one in ten thousand and one in a hundred thousand. If no more than five per cent of those who come to Lourdes were there to treat their cancers, there should have been something between fifty and 500 ‘miraculous’ cures of cancer alone. Since only three of the attested sixty-five cures are of cancer, the rate of spontaneous remission at Lourdes seems to be lower than if the victims had just stayed at home. Of course, if you’re one of the sixty-five, it’s going to be very hard to convince you that your trip to Lourdes wasn’t the cause