Doctor! Doctor!

Academia.edu has alerted me to an update to one of Joe Marino’s useful and comprehensive bibliographies of works related to the Shroud, this one being “Individual Medical Doctors’ Viewpoints on the Authenticity of the Shroud of Turin.”¹ The two latest entries, both via YouTube, are interviews with Philippe Boxho (misspelled Boxo), and Alfonso Canabal. That brings Marino’s total to 63 who think the Shroud authentic and 4 who think it isn’t. More recently, the British Society For The Turin Shroud has chosen a top ten to represent medical opinion on the Shroud,² also, presumably, to try to demonstrate that the Shroud is so realistic and so clear that precise anatomical and pathological details can be observed on it, with the corollary that no medieval craftsman would have known enough to depict them so accurately. Unfortunately, the huge variety of conflicting observations and disagreements between the ‘medical doctors’ in fact shows that almost no clear and detailed observations can be actually be made, and the alleged conformity with anatomical and pathological accuracy, and thus the impossibility of a medieval provenance, is spurious.

Very few of the ‘individual medical doctors’ have made any independent study of the Shroud; for most, their evangelical zeal has rendered that completely unnecessary, so they simply quote the findings of one or more of their predecessors without any serious review, or else they consider what they think “would have happened” under various hypothetical circumstances and fitted those ideas to the image as best they can. Even those who have studied it in detail have usually, in the words of James Malcolm Cameron, been “treating the Shroud as a photograph,” rather than querying whether it is or not. Their diagnoses are akin to those who think the Mona Lisa may have suffered from hypothyroidism because her skin looks a bit yellow, or that Botticelli’s Venus had anaemia because her skin is so white, without considering that these characteristics may be artefacts of the paintings rather than properties of the bodies they were modelled on.

For what it’s worth, here’s a review of some of the more significant to have published their opinions: if anyone would like to know more about others – the ones who think the ‘water’ of the blood and water came from Jesus’s stomach, for example, or the ones who see exit wounds for the spear in the front or back image – please let me know in the comments.

Yves Delage and Paul Vignon
The pioneers of anatomical and pathological examination of the Shroud, in the 19th century, were zoologists rather than specifically human medical doctors, but no less authoritative for that (Delage wrote a significant treatise on the function of the semi-circular canals in the human ear, for example), and with the facilities of the Sorbonne and the Museum of Natural History at their disposal for experimenting. It seems that both men were more or less gripped by the Shroud after the publication of Secondo Pia’s photo, and worked with four other colleagues and friends to try to explain the formation of the image. After a year or so they decided that they had discovered a satisfactory “physico-chemical” process that could account for the image, and Delage presented their findings at one of the weekly Monday meetings of the Académie des Sciences in Paris, on 21 April 1902.³ Although his paper was almost entirely technical, and described vaporographic experiments using medals, bas reliefs, and plaster hands wearing suede gloves, and although he made the entirely reasonable speculation that the image on the Shroud could have been achieved by a similar process, involving “febrile sweat” and “aloe impregnated cloth,” he upset the strictly non-religious ethos of the Académie by emphasising the “extreme beauty” of the image, its “anatomical perfection,” and the realism of the bloodflows, none of which were germane to the essence of his presentation. Accompanying his presentation with the unashamedly hagiographical treatment by Paul Vignon, Le Linceul du Christ, Étude Scientifique,⁴ also didn’t do him any favours. The much censored précis of his paper in the published proceedings of the meeting³ prompted Delage to publish some of the omitted parts in the more liberal Revue Scientifique,⁵ and this set in train the succession of re-assessments and contradictory observations that have continued to the present day.

A representative paragraph from Vignon’s book will lead us neatly into the next investigator: “M. Gautier also personally assured me that viscous sweat strongly charged with urea would be given off by any fever patient in a crisis of pain. Further – and this is of great importance – a man who has been tortured for a length of time will at death be found to have his body covered with a deposit rich in urea. This deposit left after the heavy sweating, caused by acute pain, has somewhat evaporated. The skin would remain moist. If, then, after death such a corpse were covered with a sheet soaked in aloes, the urea would ferment, carbonate of ammonia would be produced, ammoniacal vapours would arise; these vapours would oxidize the aloes, and would produce on the cloth a negative by chemical action.”

Pierre Barbet
La Passion de N. S. Jésus Christ selon le Chirurgien was published in 1950,⁶ when Barbet was in his sixties, and regretfully no longer able to lecture in public, and acts as a compendium of a large number of previous publications based on his researches and experiments carried out in 1932 and 1935. He had been a surgeon at Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Paris, and had battlefield experience in World War One. His book is unashamedly subjective, steeped in the theology of the Passion throughout, but is nevertheless a very detailed anatomical and pathological survey of the body Barbet saw represented on the Shroud, and has formed the basis for most of the subsequent medical opinion published on the Shroud ever since. Along the way, however, he completely disagreed with Paul Vignon about how the blood was transferred and how the image was formed.

“Vignon, who was completely imbued with his aloeticoammoniacal theory of vaporographic impressions (a theory which he, however, found much less satisfactory from 1938 onwards) thought that it was ammonia which had again dissolved the fibrin and had liquefied the clots. He made an experiment by placing some clots on a substance which had been soaked in a solution of ammonia. In any case it would no longer have been normal, living blood, but a coloured liquid, susceptible of flowing, incapable of recoagulating. Such flows, taking place in a horizontal position in the tomb, would have been disastrous for our blood-stained images; in fact, there is no coloured flow on the shroud; there are only counter-drawings of clots.

Vignon’s hypothesis is thus unable to account for our blood-stained images; on the contrary, it only makes for confusion. More than that, it has no basis in fact, nor has his theory of ammoniacal browning by the aloes. It is true that the fibrin will dissolve in a solution of ammonia; but I find no signs of ammonia on the shroud. […] According to Vignon’s theory, which is the oldest, the markings are due to a browning of the aloes which was spread over the linen, owing to the exhalation of ammonia by the body. These vapours would act in inverse ratio to the distance between the outlines of the body and the surface of the shroud. (The future will perhaps tell us whether there is any truth in this last phrase; I certainly do not see how it can apply to the image produced beneath the corpse; but let us pass on!) These vapours would be due to the decomposition of the urea; (formed by the sweat and blood which had accumulated or the surface of the corpse?) At this point I refuse to follow him. We have recently seen, in regard to the clots which are supposed to have been liquefied by dissolving fibrin, how this transformation of urea into carbonate of ammonia was both problematic and a slow process. Vignon’s theory, which seemed so attractive at first sight, raises yet further difficulties; its foundations especially seem to be unsound.”

Barbet did not commit himself to a particular image mechanism except to say that he was certain ammonia was not involved, and concentrated his attention towards the anatomy of the image, the position of the nails in the wrists, and the cause of death. His conclusions are neatly summarised by our next in the chain of contradiction, Fred Zugibe.

Robert Bucklin and Frederick Zugibe
In 1978, Bucklin was 62, and Acting Chief of the Forensic Medical Division in the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Medical Examiner Office, while Zugibe was 50, and Chief Medical Examiner of Rockland County, New York. Both were committed Christians, Zugibe a Catholic.

In 1997, Bucklin wrote that he had “personally examined over 25,000 bodies by autopsy to determine the cause and manner of death,”⁷ but his first essay on the Shroud, ‘Legal and Medical Aspects of the Trial and Death of Christ,’ was in 1970.⁸ In it he wrote that the body was 71 inches tall and weighed 175 pounds. Rigor mortis had set in, but was broken at the shoulders to bend the arms downwards over the groin. The nail wound in the wrist was among the carpal bones, in such a position that it “either penetrated or stimulated” the median nerve. The angles of the bloodflows from the wrist wound, about 10° apart, show that the arms were raised about 65° from the horizontal, and the cause of death was postural asphyxia. [I am hugely indebted to Teddi Pappas (see comment below) for unearthing an article Bucklin wrote on the Shroud for The Linacre Quarterly in 1958.⁹ It is available online. Interestingly, his medical opinion doesn’t seem to have changed in the next 40 years.] Bucklin’s conclusions concur pretty well with those of Pierre Barbet, but on the other hand, in 1995, Fred Zugibe wrote:

“Barbet’s studies are centred around three major hypotheses:
1). The man of the Shroud of Turin was nailed through an area of the wrist called Destot’s Space and not through the palm of the hand.
2). The missing thumb on the Shroud was due to injury to the median nerve by the passage of the nail.
3). The man of the Shroud died of asphyxiation.
It is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate that all three hypotheses of Barbet are, in fact, untenable.”¹⁰

Zugibe, who made observations and performed experiments on cadavers, as had Barbet, concluded that Barbet had made serious anatomical errors. The nail could not have passed through Destot’s space, and did not damage the median nerve. Even if it had, no median nerve damage causes the retraction of the thumb claimed by Barbet. And the cause of death was hypovolemic shock, not asphyxiation.

John Heller
Heller was a ‘medical doctor,’ but he made very few pronouncements about the anatomy of the body he thought had lain under the cloth and produced the image. He did, however, decide that the nail wound was between the radius and ulnar,¹¹ in marked difference from both Bucklin, his fellow STuRP team member, and Fred Zugibe.

James Cameron
In England, Home Office Pathologist James “Taffy” Cameron was 48 when he contributed a chapter to Face to Face with the Turin Shroud, by Peter Jennings in 1978. ¹² Four years later he was consulted by the BBC to present a virtual autopsy for the ‘QED’ programme ‘Shroud of Jesus, Fact or Fake?‘ in 1982.¹³ He says he concurs with Robert Bucklin, though he decided the man was 66 inches rather than 71 inches high, and that there was no indication of any metallic coin or object over the eyes, contrary to Bucklin’s observation that there was.

Alan Whanger
Paradoxically, Whanger’s evangelical zeal has probably done more to discredit authenticism in the eyes of disbelievers than many hardened medievalists. He was was the originator of the idea that multiple flowers, other plant materials and just about all the instruments of the passion can be seen on the Shroud, the originator of the idea that the Shroud is to some extent an X-ray, and the originator (with reference to the Shroud) of the phrase “points of congruence,” which have never been described or enumerated.¹⁴ Almost all his ‘discoveries’ have been both enthusiastically embraced and surreptiously suppressed in equal measure by different authenticists. In the days before image manipulation by computer, Whanger devised ingenious manipulation methods of his own by using twin projectors focussed on the same place. He found that two identical images, one the ‘negative’ of the other, slightly offset, gave an interesting pseudo three-dimensional appearance, and that any two facial images, adjusted in brightness using sheets of polaroid rotated in front of them, could be cross-faded from one to the other, giving an illusion of some congruity. This “Polarized Image Overlay Technique” has become almost as hallowed as the “VP-8 Image Analyser,” both impressively sophisticated in their time, but now superseded by software accessible to anyone with a laptop.

Michael Baden
Remarkably, the BSTS recruit Baden to their side, with the quote: “The bloodstains are too perfect to have been painted. They show the natural separation of blood serum from clotting, something an artist could not easily simulate. The path of the wounds is forensically valid.” I’ve no idea where this quote came from, and neither do they. Baden is still a practising forensic pathologist, was Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York for a couple of years, and has been called on to help investigate the murders of J.F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, O.J. Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein and George Floyd, among others. In 1980 he was interviewed a couple of times on the Shroud, and was highly skeptical. He concluded that “the Shroud probably never contained a corpse, and that – even if it did – a qualified pathologist could not read the kind of conclusions being held out as ‘expert medical opinion’ on what it purportedly shows … If I had to go into a court room, I could not say there was rigor, whether the man was alive or dead, or that this picture was a true reflection of injuries on the body. I do know dead bodies: human beings don’t produce this kind of pattern.”¹⁵

Wolfgang Bonte
While any number of ‘medical doctors’ have expressed an opinion, few have been highly qualified and experienced pathologists such as those preceding this entry, among which group Wolfgang Bonte should certainly be numbered. He too had extensive experience of conducting post mortems, and was for a spell president of the International Association of Forensic Sciences. After studying the blood flows, he decided that “In my opinion, everything speaks to the fact that the blood circulation activity had not yet ended.”¹⁶

Miguel Lorente Acosta
A specialist in legal and forensic medicine, with a particular interest in violence, Lorente is another whose examination of the Shroud image has convinced him the incumbent was alive. He sees no ‘signs of death,’ such as rigor mortis or, especially, the distribution of the blood in a dead body after death, and he sees positive ‘signs of life,’ such as hypocalcaemia affecting the positions of the thumbs and fingers.¹⁷

Matteo Borrini
Borrini is Associate Professor of Forensic Anthropology at Liverpool John Moores University, and has worked on several excavations of ancient and medieval cemeteries. He famously conducted a Blood Pattern Analysis on the Shroud with Luigi Garlaschelli,¹⁸ and has decided that in his opinion the Shroud does not derive from a crucified corpse at all.

Joseph Gambescia and Gilbert Lavoie
Here we have a couple of medical practitioners rather than forensic examiners, whose studies of the Shroud have resulted in idiosyncratic conclusions not generally recognised by anyone else. Gambescia primarily focussed on the nail wounds in the feet (not the scourge marks, as the BSTS supposes), and after considerable examination and experiment, decided that the Shroud shows evidence of two nails, one pinning the right foot against the upright, and a second, through both feet, anchoring the other foot on top.¹⁹ Equally detailed observation led Barbet and Bucklin to declare a single nail pinning both feet to the upright of the cross, while Zugibe thought the feet must have been nailed individually, side by side. Since the discovery of the Jehohanan heel-bone, other ‘expert’ pathologists have seen bloodflows coming from the sides of the heels. Obviously, in spite of all these people’s autopsy experience, the Shroud marks are actually insufficiently distinctive for any decisive conclusions.

From feet to hair: Lavoie has taken the old observation that the hair looks as if it was falling from an upright head rather than one lying down and decided that the image must have been formed while the body was actually vertical, hanging in mid-air.²⁰ He also thinks that some shadows he observes on the image indicate that it was derived from a light source shining downwards on the body from a little above and in front of it. He is completely alone in his conclusions.

José de Palacios Carvajal and José Villalaín Blanco
Authors, respectively of La Sábana Santa: Estudio de un Cirujano²¹ and Patografía de Jesús de Nazaret;²² both surgeons, and Blanco, a professor of forensic medicine to boot. Both considered that the anatomical reality and forensic consistency shown by the Shroud image makes it impossible that it could have been produced by an artist. Unfortunately, each of them finds a different ‘reality,’ so in spite of their confidence one, the other or both have not identified what is actually there on the Shroud.

Philippe Boxho
Arriving back where we started, Boxho is an internationally celebrated Belgian forensic pathologist with over 30,000 bodies’ experience, who has published several best-selling books, such as Les Morts ont la Parole and Entretien Avec un Cadavre. His interview with Famille Chrétienne, is in French, but part of it has been expertly dubbed into English.²³ He describes the man of the Shroud as between 178 and 180cm tall, explains exactly how the crown of thorns created puncture wounds all over the scalp, apparently not noticing that most of the scalp is missing from the images, and what there is does not show a great many puncture wounds, and says that “as a result your hair must be really soaked – drenched in blood, and that’s what we see on the Shroud.” Which of course we don’t. I wonder how carefully he has examined it.

He is also in no doubt how Jesus died. “The death of Christ on the cross is what we call death by positional asphyxia. […] His oxygen level will gradually decrease because he can no longer breathe properly. […] Gradually, because of the CO₂, the blood becomes acidic. This is what we call acidosis, and since this acidosis is caused by deficient breathing, in medicine we call this respiratory acidosis. That’s what he dies from.” And that seems reasonable, but does not need an examination of the Shroud to guess at. Experiments carried out by Fred Zugibe suggested that volunteers attached to crosses in appropriate postures had no difficulty breathing, in spite of great discomfort.

Alfonso Canabal
Canabal is Spanish, head of the Intensive Care Unit at the Hospital Universitario de la Princesa in Madrid, and his interview, with Radiotelevisión Diocesana de Toledo, has been very primitively translated and dubbed by a robot, but is comprehensible enough.²⁴ He suggests at the beginning of the interview that he has recently carried out some research on the Shroud, but it’s not clear what it is. Discussion of the medical condition of the body of the images doesn’t begin for nearly half an hour, and then the first statement is that Jesus was 180-181cm tall, which is about 5cm taller than most estimates. Eventually, Canabal tells us how he thinks Jesus died. “The most accepted hypothesis,” he says, “is due to respiratory failure. It has always been said that when hanging, all the intercostal muscles are stretched and it is very difficult to breathe in. […] That is probably why he was exhausted, but it should not have been the cause of death, because he was speaking until the end. And a person who suffers terminal respiratory failure enters a comatose phase due to carbon [dioxide] retention, and could not have been speaking [the seven last words] and could not have [cried out] at the end. […] Therefore, it was not only respiratory, but it must have been haemorrhagic shock, due to all the blood lost in trauma; heart failure, which he surely had for sure, because he had pulmonary oedema, and that is clearly reflected in the Holy Sudarium. When they took him down from the cross, they first placed the Holy Sudarium to cover his face, and there he emitted fluid. […] Interviewer: Through the nose and through the mouth? Canabal: Yes. On the Holy Sudarium of Oviedo you can see blood coming from the mouth and nose, but also fluid, clear fluid, and that is the pulmonary issue. So that is heart failure, respiratory failure, acidosis due to hypotension, haemorrhage and a significant internal muscular trauma from all the blows he received.”

And so it goes. No two medical specialists can agree on the stature of the body, the position of the wounds, the angles of the blood flow, the X-ray effect, or the cause of death, and each one thinks that his is the only correct diagnosis, and that all the others, however well qualified or experienced, are therefore wrong. That is not to say that this cacophony of discordance means that none of these people knows what they are talking about – they are all, after all, ‘Medical Doctors’ with at least some advanced training in anatomy and pathology – no, what it shows is that they are all reading their own ideas into the very indistinct marks on the cloth, from which, in truth, nothing definitive about the purported man enwrapped in it can be determined. He could just as easily have been a bas relief.

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1). ‘Individual Medical Doctors’ Viewpoints on the Authenticity of the Shroud of Turin,’ Joe Marino, academia.edu, 2021, updated 2026

2). ‘Medical Opinion on the Shroud,’ British Society for the Turin Shroud, FaceBook, 19 May 2026

3). ‘Sur la Formation d’Images Négatives par l’Action de Certaines Vapeurs,’ Paul Vignon, read by Yves Delage, Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Séances de l’Académie des Sciences, Vol. 34, 1902 (at gallica.bnf.fr)

4). Le Linceul du Christ, Étude Scientifique, Paul Vignon, 1902

5). ‘Le Linceul de Turin,’ Yves Delage, Revue Scientifique, Series 4, Vol 17, 1902 (at gallica.bnf.fr)

6). La Passion de N. S. Jésus Christ selon le Chirurgien, Pierre Barbet, 1950

7). ‘An Autopsy on the Man of the Shroud,’ Robert Bucklin, 1997 (at shroud.com)

8). ‘The Legal and Medical Aspects of the Trial and Death of Christ,’ Robert Bucklin, Medicine, Science and the Law, 1970 (at shroud.com)

9). ‘The Medical Aspects of the Crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ: From a Study of the Shroud of Turin,’ Robert Bucklin, The Linacre Quarterly, 1958 (at epublications.marquette.edu)

10). ‘Pierre Barbet Revisited,’ Frederick Zugibe, Sindon, 1995 (at shroud.com)

11). ‘The Probability of the Shroud Being a Forgery,’ John Heller, unpublished, 1981 (at shroud.com)
Heller actually says “between the tibia and fibula of the wrist,” which is quite a major anatomical mistake.

12). Face to Face with the Turin Shroud, Peter Jennings, 1978

13). ‘Q.E.D. Shroud of Jesus, Fact or Fake?’ BBC, 1982 (on YouTube)

14). ‘Polarized image overlay technique: a new image comparison method and its applications,’ Alan & Mary Whanger, Applied Optics, 1985
The Shroud Of Turin: An Adventure Of Discovery, Mary & Alan Whanger, 1998

15). Quoted in ‘The Shroud of Turin: Medical Examiners Disagree,’ Reginald Rhein, Medical World News, 1980
(I can’t find this online)

16). Quoted in Kriminalfall Golgatha: der Vatikan, das Turiner Grabtuch und der Wirkliche Jesus, Karl Herbst, 1992
Extensive translation in ‘A Living Man among the Dead,’ Helmut Felzmann, at old.world-mysteries.com

17). 42 Días: Análisis Forense de la Crucifixión y la Resurrección de Jesucristo, Miguel Lorente, 2007

18). ‘A BPA Approach to the Shroud of Turin,’ Matteo Borrini and Luigi Garlaschelli, Journal of Forensic Sciences, 2018

19). ‘Joseph M. Gambescia, M.D. and the Position of the Feet on the Shroud of Turin. The History of an Investigation,’ Paul Maloney, 2014 (at shroud.com)

20). The Shroud of Jesus: And the Sign John Ingeniously Concealed, Gilbert Lavoie, 2023

21). Sabana Santa. Estudio De Un Cirujano, José Palacios Carvajal, 2009

22). Patografía de Jesús de Nazaret, José Delfín Villalaín Blanco, 2016

23). ‘Ce Médecin Légiste a Réalisé l’Autopsie du Christ à Partir du Saint-Suaire,’ Famille Chrétienne, 2024 (on YouTube)
A short extract dubbed into English was available for a while, but it seems to have been redacted.

24). ‘Focus on two 24: Alfonso Canabal, a scientific analysis of the Shroud of Turin,’ Radiotelevisión Diocesana de Toledo, 2026 (on YouTube)