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One of the most astounding stories of modern times is that of the development of the shrine and great healing center at Lourdes to which travel yearly from many parts of the world thousands of ill and maimed seeking—and often finding—miraculous cures.
Lourdes, once a small isolated village in the French Pyrenees, is today a prosperous modern town whose shrine and spring have become a goal for the yearly pilgrimages. Mrs. Blanton has written in a most understanding and charming fashion of the half starved, sick and neglected little peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, whose visions seen in 1858 in her 14th year had such far-reaching effects. The touching story of the little girl who saw a tiny girlish figure, called The Virgin by her townsmen, reads like a medieval tale and it is hard to believe that it occurred in modern times. The author has reconstructed the background of Bernadette and the credulity of the country folk in a way that makes the occurrence more understandable: a tiny semi-isolated community with a simple folk whose life centered about their market and religion, and among whom visions were a frequent occurrence and always a source of excitement and enthusiasm. The healing spring was at that time a tiny, muddy place in which the Virgin bid Bernadette bathe her face. The desperate wish of a mother who washed her dying baby in the spring and claimed a cure, established the healing qualities of the water at once. It is pathetic to read of the great eagerness of the people at that time to believe in miracle after miracle, though many were disproved before their eyes.
The author makes no attempt to discuss the psychological aspects of either the visions or the cures of modern Lourdes. The famous doctors of Bernadette's time, among whom was Charcot, considered her visions to be hysterical manifestations connected with the severe tuberculosis of which she died at the age of 35. Presumably the modern medical viewpoint would coincide with theirs. Howeve