In studying the growth of history, or of anything, nowadays, we no longer study it as a cold chronology of events. We are as interested in "how" and "why" as "what happened." We wish to understand history in depth as a process of spiritual biology that reaches down into the subsoil from which it springs. Everything else stems from this authentic meaning of history, which can be grasped, only by realizing that the historical deed is merely the visible outgrowth of the root process—which is represented by the spirit in the evolution of this sprouting.

Applying this criterion to the evolution of medicine in its relationship with religion, we can resort to the same "law of dependencies" that Taine borrowed from biology and applied to art.

According to this law, there is in every zoologic species one fundamental, symptomatic fact around which all the rest gather and take shape. This fundamental fact—dentition in mammals or form in art—is a vital key to the historical dynamics in the history of medicine. Of such a nature, in the comparative study of religion and medicine, is the "Healing Miracle." More important than the emergence of a Healing Miracle anecdote or story os the undercurrent that originated the miracle in each historical period.

The term, "miracle," suggests an event whose cause is unknown in essence and mechanism and whose nature is unusual. The word "miracle" comes from the Latin mirari "to wonder." And for a miracle to be so considered—as laid down by Thomas Aquinas in his Questiones Disputatio, it is required that its cause be unknown and that its effects be in contra position to those normally obtained. In medicine, any cure attained by a mysterious procedure—the result of which was surpassed by those obtained by normal methods and, often, contrary to the result logically expected—was called a "miracle."

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