Early Christian literature abounds in references to sickness and the miraculous cure. Indeed, the miraculous cure is perhaps the most common type scene in sacred biography and history. Why are stories of sick people who are cured by monks and bishops so common, particularly relative to accounts of other “miracles” such as villages saved from marauding enemies or of crops saved from locusts or drought? To date, scholars of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages have shied away from this question. To quote one distinguished historian, “It is usually fruitless to indulge in speculation about what might have been the ‘real’ basis of miracle stories.” Since the Enlightenment, miracles largely have been seen as beyond the bounds of historical analysis. Correspondingly, sacred biography and history, because they are replete with miracles, have been ignored or cast as overly fictitious.