The “Sick Train”
Every day a train leaves Paris for the nine-hour journey to Lourdes. Most of the passengers are pilgrims of one sort or another. Many suffer from illnesses or ailments that may not be apparent to the casual observer. All are seeking some sort of spiritual renewal, and many are hoping for alleviation of a physical problem that has not responded to conventional medical therapy. Every hour on the hour, the train stops at an important historic site that is involved in some way with the Christian faith, including Orleans for Joan of Arc, Tours for St. Martin, and Poitiers for Charles Martel. The travelers are part of an annual migration numbering in the millions, all bound for the tiny town of Lourdes, population fifteen thousand, nestled deep in the rugged Pyrenees Mountains of southern France.
One hundred years ago the trip was not so easy. The train left Paris at 5:30 a.m. and arrived at 3:40 a.m. the following day, some 22 hours later. “Make way for the sick” was a cry heard at all the stops. Each car was divided into several compartments with wooden benches lining the sides. Stretchers could be put down for the gravely ill. Nurses and doctors were in attendance, but, in spite of care, death on the train was not uncommon. Pilgrims brought on board their own food and chamber pots so that in time each compartment became its own little “fetid fellowship.” Wealthy and poor rode side-by-side, shedding inhibitions about contamination, waste disposal, etc. As class distinctions disappeared, a peculiar type of devotion developed out of helping and caring for others.
The pilgrims were on their way to pray at the site of the miraculous visions experienced by the little peasant girl, now saint, Bernadette Soubirous. During a two-week period in 1858, Bernadette saw a vision of the Virgin Mary eighteen times in a niche of a cave along the Gave du Pau River near her home. A succession of endorsements, witnesses, and testimonials followed, leading to the site’s becoming a pilgrimage destination associated with miraculous healing.
Most of us are skeptical, some are interested, and some a bit enchanted. Indeed, among us there is no lack of scoffers.
In 1903, one such skeptical physician was invited to ride the train. Alexis Carrel, a 29-year-old faculty member at the medical school in Lyons, decided to accept the invitation and “see for himself.” Dr. Carrel was a brilliant young physician, a talented researcher, and a doubting observer. He grabbed his notebook and boarded the “Sick Train.”
As the train hurtled south, Dr. Carrel made rounds asking questions and taking notes. One traveler, 22-year-old Marie Bailly, lay on a makeshift mattress stretched across two benches. She suffered from tuberculous peritonitis. Flushed, feverish, emaciated, spitting blood, and ashen in color, she lay at death’s door. Dr. Carrel was so alarmed he demanded to know how anyone so ill could be put aboard a train. The story of Marie’s recovery at Lourdes was recorded in detail in his little notebook. She died 35 years later at the age of 57.
Dr. Carrel presented his findings to the French medical community. The reaction was so hostile that he was forced to leave the country, planning to “give up medicine and take a farm in Canada.”
Fortunately, his research results had preceded him. The Rockefeller Institute in New York City offered him a position and a laboratory. In 1912, Dr. Carrel was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his development of methods for suturing small blood vessels. Some of his techniques are used to this day.
But he never forgot his night with little Marie on the “Sick Train.” Her recovery before his very eyes so astonished him that he wrote, “There are certain links, as yet unknown, between psychological and organic processes. There is some objective value in spiritual activity.” In addition he felt that “scientists should not deny what they themselves have not seen!” Such statements seem reasonable enough, yet …