Dorothea Trudel was a worker in flowers, and in time came to have many workers under her, and when she was about thirty-seven years of age, four or five of her workers fell sick.  The sickness resisted all treatment, grew worse, appeared to be hopeless.  She was a deep, earnest Christian, and while diligent and unselfish as a nun, yet her anxiety for her work people drew her to earnest prayer and study of the Scriptures for relief.  Like a sudden light, she says, the well known prayer of the Epistle of James, 5:  14, 15, flashed upon her.

“If medical skill was unavailing, was there not prayer?  And could not the same Lord who chose to heal through medicines, also heal without them?  Was he necessarily restricted to the one means?  There was a time when his healing power went forth directly; might it not be put forth directly still?”

Agitated by these questions, she sought help in prayer, and then kneeling by the bedside of these sick people, she prayed for them.  They recovered; and the thought that at first had startled her, became now the settled conviction of her life.

Her reputation spread; others who were sick, came to her for relief, but she sought only the recovery of the patients by prayer alone.  Many recovered.  Her doors were besieged, and at last she consented to receive invalids at her home, from compassion.  By degrees her own house grew into three, and at last it became in fact a hospital.

She lived a life of humility, and perfect simplicity, yet strength of faith, and at her death her work was, and still is, carried on by Mr. Zeller, who also has had marvelous successes in answer to prayer.

REMARKABLE CURES.

There have been gathered together in her biography, well authenticated cases of answer to prayer, when the patient was considered wholly incapable of help from medical skill.

“There was one of a stiff knee, that had been, treated in vain by the best physicians in France, Germany and Switzerland; one of an elderly man who could not walk, and had been given up by his physicians, but who soon dispensed with his crutches; a man came with a burned foot, and the surgeons said it was a case of ‘either amputation or death’ and he also was cured; one of the leading physicians of Wurtemburg, testifies to the cure of a hopeless patient of his own; another remained six weeks, and says he saw all kinds of sicknesses healed; cancers and fevers have been treated with success; epilepsy and insanity more frequently than any other form of disease.

“Neither is the life and experience of Dorothea Trudel an exceptional one.  Pastor Blumenhart of Wurtemberg, has had his home crowded for years with patients, and cures occur constantly.

“The mother of Dorothea Trudel was an eminently pious woman, and it was her custom, when any of her children were ill, to bring them in prayer before the feet of the Heavenly Physician, as Dorothea herself says:  ’Our mother had no cure except prayer, and though at that time we did not understand, yet since then we have found it out, that it was the healing hand of the Saviour alone, that helped and restored us.’”