It may come as a surprise to you to learn that the Catholic Church, to this very day, authorizes exorcisms. According to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), exorcism is “a specific form of prayer that the Church uses against the power of the devil.” “There are instances,” the USCCB explains, “when a person needs to be protected against the power of the devil or to be withdrawn from his spiritual dominion.”
Indeed. Demonic possession is no trivial matter—and not just anyone can cure it. You must secure the services of a qualified bishop or priest, and only then with the express approval of your jurisdiction’s head bishop. The process is cumbersome, but it exists for your protection. After all, you wouldn’t want to place the care of your soul in the hands of some charlatan.
The exorcism itself consists of scriptural readings from the Gospels, along with liberal doses of holy water. Prayers, litanies, and holy relics are then used before the demon is finally commanded to depart. It’s a long, arduous, complicated process. Only the best, and most qualified, can perform it.
Incidentally, this treatment regimen—complete with incantations and purifications—closely resembles what ancient Greek physicians prescribed for epilepsy more than 2,400 years ago. Many Greeks believed that epilepsy was caused—not by abnormal electrical activity in the brain—but by demonic possession. And the way to drive out spirits, then as now, was through the power of properly articulated, magical words.
If this all sounds a bit suspicious to you, you’re in good company. Hippocrates—the father of Western medicine—didn’t buy it either.
The life of Hippocrates, like many ancient figures, is shrouded in mystery. We know that he was born in 460 BCE on the Greek island of Kos, but beyond that, nothing about his life is definitively known. What we do know is that his school of medicine revolutionized the field. Hippocrates was the first to fight against superstition and for the idea that all disorders of the body ultimately stem from natural causes (even if he didn’t yet know what they were).
This was no small feat. Greek society was a culture saturated in superstition. Most people, after all, were content to believe that earthquakes sprung from the force of Poseidon’s trident. So when someone presented with the symptoms of uncontrollable shaking and jerking, slurred speech, and confusion, it wasn’t a stretch to believe that their body had been overtaken by evil spirits. The remedy, it was assumed, was a regimen of prayers, sacrifices, purification rituals, and chants—guidance the Catholic Church still considers to be state-of-the-art (although not necessarily for epilepsy).
But just as the natural philosophers had demythologized nature, Hippocrates sought to do the same for the body. The “sacred disease,” as epilepsy was known at the time, was to be, from this point forward, understood in naturalistic terms. “Men regard its nature and cause as divine from ignorance and wonder,” Hippocrates explains in On the Sacred Disease. “And this notion of its divinity is kept up by their inability to comprehend it, and the simplicity of the mode by which it is cured, for men are freed from it by purifications and incantations.”
What Hippocrates wrote next is pivotal; with the stroke of a pen, he exposed the very mechanism by which charlatans preserve their authority in medicine. Faith healers—to use a more modern term—insulate themselves from criticism in a precise and predictable way. Hippocrates performed the invaluable service of laying this strategy bare.
“They who first referred this malady [epilepsy] to the gods appear to me to have been just such persons as the conjurors, purificators, mountebanks, and charlatans now are,” Hippocrates wrote, “who give themselves out for being excessively religious, and as knowing more than other people.”
Faith healers, equipped with this divine authority, next prescribe courses of treatment “safe for themselves…by applying purifications and incantations, and enforcing abstinence from baths and many articles of food which are unwholesome to men in diseases.”
This is the key move: faith healers are careful to never prescribe anything potent enough to cause actual physiological harm. That way, if the patient dies, it was the fault of the gods or spirits (or the patient). Yet if the patient recovers—of their own accord, of course—then the charlatan gets full credit. They never risk failure—because every possible outcome can be explained away.
As Hippocrates put it:
If the person should recover, theirs would be the honor and credit; and if he should die, they would have a certain defense, as if the gods, and not they, were to blame, seeing they had administered nothing either to eat or drink as medicines, nor had overheated him with baths, so as to prove the cause of what had happened.
Hippocrates had uncovered the foundation upon which the next two-thousand years of homeopathic medicine, faith healing, and exorcisms would be built. The USCCB leans on it to this day—as do countless New Age and homeopathic practitioners. Accidental successes are emphasized; the greater number of failures, dismissed. It is a self-protecting system that has survived in every era of human history. But systems that cannot be tested cannot fail. And systems that cannot fail can never improve.
Not that Hippocrates knew how to treat epilepsy any better. He believed that all illnesses came from an imbalance in bodily fluids (humors). His prescriptions included dietary changes, exercise, sufficient sleep, and possibly bloodletting. We are a long way from the anti-seizure medications and neurosurgical advances of modern medicine. But we would have never reached these advances at all if we had limited ourselves to chanting words at patients from sacred texts and hoping for the best.
So the next time you place your trust in a trained physician rather than the incantations of a priest, remember the lesson—a method that explains every outcome explains nothing at all—and that is precisely why it endures.
References
Goldberg, Herbert S. Hippocrates: Father of Medicine. Muriwai Books, 2017.
Hippocrates. On the Sacred Disease. Dalcassian Publishing Company, 2023.
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. “Exorcism.” Accessed April 9, 2026. https://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/sacraments-and-sacramentals/sacramentals-blessings/exorcism.