Medicine, Diagnosis, and Causal Exclusion

Healing claims provide Lambertini’s most developed laboratory for evidential discipline. The Church cannot infer miracle merely from temporal proximity to prayer or from the surprise of witnesses.

From the actual text, the recurring criteria are substantially these:

the disease must be grave and naturally difficult or impossible to cure;

it must not already have entered a normal stage of decline in which sudden improvement might naturally occur;

no adequate medicine or human treatment may explain the recovery;

the healing should occur suddenly or instantaneously where that is required by the class of miracle;

it must be complete, not partial or truncated;

it must not merely result from an ordinary crisis, evacuation, or comparable natural process;

the cure must persist, without relapse into the same disease or displacement into another condition that shows the original pathology was not truly removed.

Lambertini's own later summary lists gravity and difficulty of natural cure, suddenness, state of the disease, absence of crisis, independence from medicine, completeness, restoration of strength and normal function, permanence, and exclusion of relapse or transition to another disease.

The famous list is therefore less like seven arbitrary checkboxes than a causal exclusion protocol.

And Lambertini insists repeatedly upon competent medical judgment. In discussing whether a disease was already declining naturally and whether medication could explain recovery, he expressly says the judgment of physicians is necessary.

This deserves special emphasis because popular miracle apologetics often gets it wrong.

Lambertini explicitly recognizes that a person can seem near death and then recover surprisingly quickly because the disease has reached a natural crisis or phase of decline. He therefore insists that one investigate the state of the disease at the time of recovery, not merely the emotional surprise of the witnesses.

Likewise, in epilepsy, disappearance of a single attack means very little because the disease is episodic. What matters is genuine liberation from the underlying recurring condition. Lambertini highlights sudden, total, and non-returning cure as evidentially significant.

That gives us another excellent distinction:

cessation of symptoms ≠ cure of disease.

Similarly:

unexpected ≠ inexplicable.

And:

inexplicable ≠ miraculous.

Lambertini repeatedly recognizes that lay descriptions can misclassify disease.

In his discussion of cancer, gangrene, ulcers, fistulas, and related conditions, he warns that people ignorant of medicine may use one disease name for several quite different pathologies. Experts must examine the signs and symptoms to determine what the patient actually had before anyone asks whether the recovery exceeded nature.

Elsewhere he describes a proposed cure that was not considered because the physician could not safely determine the original disease and another medical expert thought it had been misdiagnosed.

So the evidential order is:

diagnosis → prognosis → treatment history → recovery → permanence → causal analysis → theological attribution.

That is strikingly disciplined.

Of course, Lambertini's eighteenth-century medical theories themselves are not contemporary medicine. His lasting contribution is the methodological structure: medical conclusions must be made according to the best competent knowledge available rather than devotional enthusiasm.

Lambertini ends the entire miracle part by investigating imagination and its powers.

That is exactly where a rigorous investigator should end.

He cites medical and theological authorities acknowledging that imagination can affect the body, produce illnesses, alleviate symptoms, and under some conditions contribute to apparent cures. Aquinas is invoked for the principle that imagination can alter bodily processes through changes associated with the heart and bodily “spirits,” especially where the material disposition permits it.

Lambertini later restates the healing criteria precisely in response to the objection that strong faith or imagination can make people feel better. He notes that temporary improvement followed by recurrence is entirely compatible with psychophysical effects; the question is whether imagination could account for a cure possessing all the required characteristics: gravity, causal independence, suddenness, completeness, absence of crisis, and permanence.

In modern categories, this is a precursor to controlling for:

placebo effects, psychosomatic change, functional disorders, expectation, emotional arousal, and spontaneous remission.

The argument should translate the medical science, but preserve the epistemic strategy.

Lambertini’s later summary requires proof of the gravity and natural difficulty of the disease, the state of the disease at the time of recovery, independence from adequate medicine, suddenness where relevant, completeness, absence of an ordinary crisis, restoration of function, permanence, and exclusion of relapse.

The logical structure is negative before it becomes positive. Medical inexplicability is a judgment that certain created causal explanations fail. Miraculousness is a further theological judgment. The distinction is indispensable.

Lambertini, De Servorum Dei IV.1, chs. VIII–XIX. His eighteenth-century medicine is historically situated; the enduring contribution is the evidentiary method, not every medical theory he employed.