“God is alive and well in the modern medical center”

The medical profession naturally involves encountering people at their most vulnerable and dealing with some of the most profound suffering that humans face. But it can also be an experience of profound joy, as when a child is born or when cancer is beaten. It is a life of hard conversations, breaking bad news, but also seeing the depth of God’s love and mercy in the face of these heavy crosses we bear.

This is the concept behind the new book You Visited Me: Grace and Healing in the Modern Medical Center (Ignatius Press, 2026), written by Robert Collins, M.D.

Dr. Collins is a professor of internal medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, where he specializes in blood cancers. He directs the Hematologic Malignancies and Cellular Therapy Program and the Combined Adult and Pediatric Stem Cell Transplant Program, and is a recipient of the Watson Award, the institution’s highest honor in clinical medicine. He thus brings a wealth of experience and expertise to this topic.

He is also a Catholic, and the story of how that came to be is one of the more moving elements of the book.

The book relates powerful true stories about God’s grace and healing, flowing from the unfolding of faith in the life of an agnostic physician, as he gradually came to see God’s movement in the lives of his patients, and ultimately his understanding of medicine as a call to participation in the love of God.

Dr. Collins recently spoke with Catholic World Report about his new book, his faith journey, and why the field of medicine seems to produce so many moving stories.

Catholic World Report: How did the book come about?

Robert Collins: I think it started with an experience I had many years ago in a little Catholic chapel on a mountainside in Switzerland while I was reading the story of the woman at the well.

I was struck by the woman’s witness to her encounter with Jesus. All she did was share her experience. No deep theology needed, just a sharing of her experience. This led the others of her town to seek Jesus themselves and come to faith in their own unique ways.

After writing down this insight (which is not a novel insight) in my journal, I had an experience that is hard to describe. All I can say is that for me, it was unmistakable, and it felt like a calling to someday share my experiences because doing so might help some people. The idea stayed in the back of my mind until a couple of years ago, when I felt like it was time to put together a book.

The book is a recounting of experiences of God’s grace and healing in the setting of a major modern medical center: the movement of his grace and healing in the life of a self-centered, agnostic physician and the quiet movements of his grace and healing in the lives of patients.

CWR: Tell us a little about your own faith journey. Have you always been Catholic, or are you a convert? Have you always been practicing?

Collins: I was baptized in the Baptist church when I was nine, but I had lost whatever faith I had as a teenager.

A few years later, I was a young, agnostic doctor, happily rolling along, full of myself, doing molecular biology in a cutting edge research laboratory, when I had a quiet little quasi-mystical experience that had the effect of slapping me awake. It made me realize that I’d been skating along the surface, ignoring something deeper, truer, crucial.

I found myself reading in areas that hadn’t interested me much before—philosophy and theology and such, and with time—a lot of time—I more or less read my way into a theistic worldview and eventually into Catholicism. But my conversion was fueled by much more than just reading; it was fueled by experience after experience of what I would have to call love—God’s love—from so many quarters: my wife, my children, experiences of nature and music and art and literature, and patients, believe it or not—so many patients who reached out to me and befriended me—cared for me—for no other reason than kindness.

With time, God’s love seeped into me, and I felt myself changing, from complete self-centeredness to at least some degree of loving God and others, including my patients. I know I have so, so far to go, but I feel blessed to be in God’s Church, where his grace and healing and love are always flowing—all you have to do is say yes.

CWR: How has your experience in the medical field affected your own faith?

Collins: As the Lord heals our blindness, we come to perceive that God’s love permeates the world, that God is Emmanuel, that the Holy Spirit lives and moves in us. This is so even—especially—in the modern medical center. Our sight being healed, we begin to perceive these beautiful stories of God’s love unfolding in our patients’ lives and in the lives of those who take care of them: stories of hope and love and mercy, and meaning in suffering, and prayers answered, and on and on.

God’s love is flowing in this place. As God has been gradually healing my sight, and as I’ve been blessed again and again to see these stories emerging, the effect has been to open my eyes even more. Faith increases. Grace begets grace, love begets love.

CWR: It seems that there are a lot of particularly moving stories that come out of medical issues and the frightening situations that can arise. Why do you think that is? Is there something about these situations that makes us seek God out, or recognize when we need him?

Collins: Many cancer patients, believe it or not, have said, “Cancer is the best thing that ever happened to me.” This is because it has awakened them from a slumber. They’ve been reminded that they are mortal; they know that this illness could finish them.

Suddenly, certain things don’t matter anymore: their exotic vacation, their big house, all the money they made in the stock market, their prestigious job. Suddenly, the only thing that matters is to give due attention to the deeper things that they’ve put off thinking about until now.

My wife, a cancer nurse, calls it “the postcard from God.” Patients always laugh when they hear that; they get it. Many patients read the postcard. Whether they are cured of their cancer or not, they end up with a profoundly deepened faith in God, repaired relationships with loved ones and others, an appreciation for what matters and what doesn’t, a desire to serve others, a sense of meaning.

CWR: In recent years and decades, it seems that the field of medicine has become particularly distorted or even perverted, with so many medical professionals engaging in horrendous practices (e.g., abortion, euthanasia, mutilation, etc.) under the guise of “care”. Would it be too dramatic to say that the devil seeks to subvert the medical profession in a special way, because of how much damage he can do that way?

Collins: That’s an interesting question, and I’ll have to say I just don’t know; the ways of the devil are mysterious to me. I do know that he’s the Father of Lies, though, and he’s very good at it. Somehow, he got Adam and Eve to eat of the fruit, and somehow, he has a huge portion of the modern world, including many doctors, believing that the practices you mention are somehow okay, even good.

Nevertheless, we must always remember: God wins. The answer to all the terrible things in the world is to work with God to become the saint he means for you to be, and then you will play the role that he intends for you. For some of us, that role will be to carry out conspicuous acts of defiance against the world’s evils; for others, that role will be to carry out small works of love which are magnified beyond imagination by our Lord, countering evil in ways that we will never know this side of heaven.

CWR: Can this book benefit non-Catholics, as well as Catholics?

Collins: Yes, many Protestant Christians as well as Catholics have told me how much this book has meant to them; the stories of God’s presence and love and healing even in the cold, machine-like setting of the modern medical center resonate with any Christian.

More, though, I think the book will benefit anybody who approaches it with goodwill, including people of other faiths and people with no professed faith at all: the book’s stories are essentially stories of love and mercy and peace, divine attributes which touch all of us deeply, no matter our religious or philosophical leanings.

CWR: What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

Collins: God is alive and well in the modern medical center. In this place of suffering, fear, and death, where his love is most needed, his love is most present.

CWR: Is there anything else you would like to add?

Collins: As I’ve finished writing this book, I’ve had this profound sense of gift—that so much has been given to me. God has begun this healing process in me, changing me from a self-centered, agnostic doctor to someone who is at least somewhere along the path toward becoming more who God means for me to be.

In the process, God has opened my eyes to his movements in the lives of so many patients. And he has sometimes even asked me very gently to play some small role in helping to bring his healing and love to a patient; he has asked me to visit him in that Matthew 25 sort of way. It’s a lot to be grateful for. The book is simply that: a response to a gift. It’s thanks.

And my hope is that sharing these experiences can perhaps help others as well.

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