In The Scalpel and the Soul: Encounters with Surgery, the Supernatural and the Healing Power of Hope, Dr. Allan J. Hamilton, who was a great neurosurgeon, concludes after years of study and experience operating on the brain, that healing isn’t from the body, it’s from the soul. Dr. Hamilton tells the story of his first job as a surgical fellow, when he was working in a burn unit for children who sustained burns over 90% of their bodies, a place that all of the young surgeons were deeply afraid of because trying to heal small bodies that were burned beyond recognition was a horrifying challenge to them. 

He eventually realized that to a physician every patient is “an existential conduit” to seeing his own struggles.  Each patient brought doctors closer to seeing the truth about themselves.” He said we’re never solitary mortal beings.  We are never left alone without divine strength and protection. Suffering is not the point of living.  “It’s the background, the context, against which we discover love’s power over death, over illness. To that, I add, suffering is the context in which we discover faith.” Dr. Hamilton discovered that faith was as fundamental as a scapel: “each new secret of medical science is nothing more than one more revelation of God’s loving and majestic power.”