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To the Editor:
It is difficult to formulate the proper response to the recent essay by Dr. Login.1 I might summarize it with this statement: articles that attempt to foster religious sentiment without evidence have absolutely no place in scientific journals. I personally am not so very interested in “neuropoetry” and the like, but I am willing to grant that your new feature Nisus: Neurology and the Humanities does fill a neglected niche. I am even willing to grant that, given the importance of religion in the lives of so many of our patients, it would not be inappropriate to examine the impact of such patient beliefs on the practice of neurology. However, Dr. Login’s essay goes considerably further than that.1
Plainly, Dr. Login believes that a miracle indeed took place in the form of the events he describes, or he would like to believe that. By inference, he would like us to consider the possibility as well—or else why write the article? This is a long way from a discussion of patient beliefs and their impact on medicine. It is asking the scientific audience of a scientific journal to consider the possibility that a miracle has occurred. It is not that the possibility of miracles is not a fit subject for science. Everything is a fit subject for science, and science happens to have a long and honest history of debunking supposed miracles. It is that the instant the question becomes the actual possibility of a miracle, it properly belongs in the peer-reviewed, evidence-based section of the scientific literature, and probably not in Neurology, but in a journal devoted …
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