Lourdes Medical Bureau - History

History

The apparitions at Lourdes took place between 11 February and 16 July 1858. After this time, reports of apparently miraculous cures began to accumulate, prompting calls for the Roman Catholic Church to recognise these events as miracles. The earliest investigations of these cases were carried out by an Episcopal Commission of Inquiry led by Canon Germain Baradère and reporting directly to Mgr Laurence, bishop of Tarbes. The commission's earliest work was conducted without medical consultation, with only clerical opinion being sought as to the nature of the cures.

In 1859, Professor Henri Vergez from the Faculty of Medicine at Montpellier was appointed medical consultant to the Episcopal Commission of Inquiry. Vergez's views were often at odds with those of his clerical colleagues. Vergez decided that only eight of the early cases were genuinely inexplicable.

In 1883 a body called the Bureau des Constatations Médicales was established by doctors affiliated with the sanctuary. This was the forerunner of the current Medical Bureau. Its first titular head was the nobleman Baron Dunot de Saint-Maclou, and the Bureau was housed at the residence of the Garaison Fathers in Lourdes. Following the establishment of the Bureau des Constatations Médicales, the number of recognised cures dropped dramatically, from 143 in 1883 to only 83 in 1884.

Dunot de Saint-Maclou died in 1891 and was succeeded by Dr. Gustave Boissarie who headed the Medical Bureau until 1914, and met with the French author Emile Zola when he visited Lourdes in August 1892. Dr. Bonamy, a character in Zola's 1894 novel Lourdes, is unflatteringly based on Boissarie. Boissarie wrote a celebrated book, L'Histoire Médicale de Lourdes in 1891, which was praised by Pope Leo XIII. Boissarie moved the offices of the Bureau to accommodation beneath the right ramp of the Upper Basilica, where he met with people who claimed to have been cured.

In 1905, Pope Pius X decreed that claims of miraculous cures at Lourdes should "submit to a proper process", in other words, to be rigorously investigated. At his instigation, the current Lourdes Medical Bureau was formed.

In 2011, the cure of a French man is under further examination to determine officially whether another miraculous cure has taken place. Twenty doctors from the medical bureau have concluded that the formerly paralysed man's recovery, which occurred in 2002, was 'remarkable'. To date, sixty-seven cures have been officially recognized as miraculous by the Roman Catholic Church.