You Visited Me: Grace and Healing in the Modern Medical Center

Anne Marie Williams reviews a book filled with stories of healing and hope as well as one doctor's journey to faith.

You Visited Me: Grace and Healing in the Modern Medical Center 

By Robert Collins, MD

Published by Ignatius Press

This is a book of experiences, of God’s grace and healing in the setting of a major modern medical center: the irruption of his grace and healing into the life of a self-centered, agnostic physician and the quiet movements of his grace and healing in the lives of patients. (p. 11)

So reads the Preface of You Visited Me: Grace and Healing in the Modern Medical Center, by oncologist (cancer doctor) Robert Collins, MD, and published by Ignatius Press.

As I began reading, I expected to read patient stories of healing and hope (including hope when physical healing did not happen) in a hospital setting. As Dr. Collins intended, I anticipated coming away with encouragement that “the modern high-tech medical center isn’t necessarily the sterile, lifeless, and machinelike place we often imagine.” Having worked for nearly 10 years myself as a nurse in an intensive care unit (ICU), I sought reminders, reassurance that “in this place of suffering, fear, and death, where God’s love is most needed, God’s love is most present” (11). You Visited Me certainly delivered on this.

But I wasn’t expecting the memoir-like quality of Collins’ book as he thoughtfully traced, through a series of vignettes--including many encounters over the years with faith-filled patients-- his own starts and stops as he shifted away from agnosticism and eventually embraced Catholicism.

You Visited Me has something to say not only to the general public, or to patients with serious illness as well as those who love and care for them. Through its pages, Collins offers a gentle, confident invitation to unbelievers, especially in the healthcare profession, to examine the evidence in their own lives that points beyond a merely clinical view of the world, to the love, the one Love that’s behind all of it, that “grounds the universe from all eternity” (85).

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Copyright 2026 Anne Marie Williams
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