Kuhlman, Kathryn (1907-1976)

Well-known Christian healer of the United States. Kuhlman was born on May 7, 1907, in Concordia, Missouri. At age 13, she had a religious experience and felt a strong call to the ministry. Though she could not find a church that would accept her, Kuhlman dropped out of school and at age 15 started preaching. She eventually became an itinerant evangelist traveling throughout the midwestern states.

Her first healing took place while she preached in Franklin, Pennsylvania, in 1946. A woman stood up and gave testimony that she had been cured of a tumor. From 1947 on, Kuhlman held regular services in the Carnegie Auditorium at Pittsburgh, where a number of cases of miraculous healing were reported during her ministry. She held services at the Carnegie Auditorium for 20 years before transferring to the First Presbyterian Church in downtown Pittsburgh.

During her services she would speak with simplicity and emotional sincerity and become transformed by what she called the Holy Spirit. Members of the congregation reported a feeling of power building up, with a healing effect. At this point Kuhlman would become clairvoyantly aware of various diseases and symptoms of ill health, which she would locate and "rebuke" from her place on the stage. "To my right in the first balcony, somebody is being healed of diabetes…. a growth has disappeared. It's a man up there in the top balcony." Kuhlman spoke rapidly in a kind of transported trancelike condition. She later revealed that she experienced out-of-the-body travel during the healing segments of her services.

She often introduced medical doctors into her programs, some of whom confirmed the reality of her miraculous cures, although one physician, William Nolen, attacked the validity of the healings.

Kuhlman died in Tulsa, Oklahoma, February 20, 1976, following open-heart surgery.

Sources:

Kuhlman, Kathryn. I Believe in Miracles. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1962.

——. Nothing Is Impossible With God. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974.

Nolen, William. Healing: A Doctor in Search of a Miracle. New York: Random House, 1975.

Spraggett, Allen. Kathryn Kuhlman: The Woman Who Believes in Miracles. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1970. Reprint, New York: New American Library, 1971.