Prologue: Miracles before the digital

Miracle cures differ greatly across time and context. What all miracle cures share, however, is their being unusual and unexpected from the perspective of empirical scientific knowledge – where an effect is said to have happened despite the absence of an acceptable cause. The miracle cure is both an in vivo concept in vernacular language and a theoretical category that travels far beyond their situated meanings. In Vietnam, the notion of the miracle cure (thần dược) is historically tied not to a Christian divine intervention tradition, but rather to the miraculous healing effects of much of the everyday garden and jungle herbs and plants. By recasting miracle cures as non-biomedical modalities, whose processes of producing, propagating, and living are historical and ongoing, we can begin to discern the limits of the misinformation paradigm and interrogate these modalities as both mediated and material.