Forty years ago, long before the recent afternoon when Dr Joseph Dutkowsky knelt at the warped feet of his four-year-old patient, he was an American small-town teenager approaching his Catholic confirmation and needing to select a patron saint. He made an unlikely choice, a newly canonised figure, St Martin de Porres, the illegitimate child of a former black slave in 16th-century Peru. Decades later, providence has bent the vectors of faith and science together in the career of Dr Dutkowsky, reports The New York Times.