Man, The Unknown

Résumé · Alexis Carrel's return to the Catholic faith after a lifetime's scepticism caused a sensation whose effects are still felt today. A world-famous scientist whose work earned him the Nobel Prize for Medical Research, he had already written of his early visit to Lourdes where he witnessed a miraculous cure, but it was overt thirty years later that he set down the result of his long meditations upon the relationship between religious faith and scientific discoveries in 'Man, the Unknown'. Translated into all the major languages of the world and steadily reprinted for nearly a quater of a century it has become a classic statement on the great issue of science and religion. Carrel himself summed up its theme in the essay on prayer that he wrote shortly before his death: 'Man needs God as he needs water and oxygen'.