While it's good to have evidence like medical records, we shouldn't dismiss cases that involve lesser forms of evidence. There's some value to testimonial evidence, there's a cumulative effect to lesser forms of evidence that aren't so significant when considered in isolation, and so on.
I've been addressing issues like these for many years. Part of what I've been responding to lately, though, are the recent claims made about miracles by people like Ethan Muse and Joe Schmid. In Joe's recent videos explaining his conversion to Roman Catholicism, he cited evidence like medical records and photographs for much of what he appealed to, but there were times when he brought up something like testimonial evidence apart from X-rays, videos, and such (e.g., his citation of the testimony of Adam Blai).
What I want to do in this post is discuss Guy Playfair's testimony about healings from an apparently non-Divine source. For those who don't know, Playfair was a paranormal researcher best known for his work on the Enfield Poltergeist. You can read a tribute to him that I wrote several years ago here.
At 15:48 on his Enfield tape 33Ai, Playfair has a discussion with the Hodgsons (the family experiencing the poltergeist) in which he mentions that they may have an ability to heal people in the future. He comments on how people who experience a poltergeist sometimes acquire an ability to heal.
Matthew Manning, who had gone through a poltergeist earlier in the 1970s and visited the Hodgsons' house on December 17, 1977, supposedly acquired some kind of capacity for healing after his poltergeist experience. Playfair claimed that he'd been healed by Manning. Go here to listen to him discussing the subject in an interview. The claim about a healing from Manning occurs at 30:15. Go here for a discussion with more detail later in the interview. He seems to refer to how Manning healed him of a "slipped disc". He says an orthopedic surgeon witnessed the healing and that the surgeon claimed to have no medical explanation of it.
Keep in mind that Playfair had worked other poltergeist cases before he did his work on Enfield, and he was relating his own firsthand experience with Manning. So, he had some significant credibility in both contexts.
An article in the Daily Mail, written shortly after Playfair's death, discusses another healing he reported:
Later came an illustrious career in journalism working for Life magazine and, from his adopted home in Rio di Janeiro, for The Economist, Time, Associated Press, The Guardian and for the press corps of the U.S. Agency for International Development. One of his assignments was an investigation into 'psychic surgeons' in Brazil who performed operations without anaesthetics, aided — so it was said — by powers not of this world.
Playfair wasn't a believer, but, suffering from tummy troubles at the time, he found himself entering an inexplicable trance and undergoing two operations conducted by a psychic surgeon called Edivaldo.
Despite no anaesthetic, instead of experiencing searing pain, he described feeling 'a very distinct plop' the first time the medium's hands entered his abdomen and 'a sort of tickling but no pain at all'.
The operation was a success. Playfair had newfound respect for the psychic healers, saying: 'If they are magicians they could be earning a fortune on the stage.'
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