Hemorrhage through the unbroken skin is a rare occurrence; but, as has been said, Dr. Pooley found 47 cases reported, and there are probably many others. The discharge may be pure blood which coagulates in crusts, or it may be blood mixed with sweat; it may be present over the whole surface of the body or only in those parts where the [{348}] skin is thin and delicate. Commonly, bloody sweat is an oozing, but Hebra, is his Diseases of the Skin, tells of a young man that he himself observed, from whose legs and hand blood ran, sometimes in minute jets one-twelfth of an inch in height. The skin was sound, and the bloody sweat was not caused by any emotion.
The flow may be intermittent, appearing at intervals from a few hours to months. Sometimes the discharge is connected with skin diseases, but often the skin is unaffected. Examples have been found at every age and in both sexes, but this sweat is commoner in women. Du Gard reports an instance in a child only three months old, and Spolinus tells of such a sweat in a child twelve years of age.
Bloody sweat may occur in malaria; it may be connected with neurasthenic conditions, and it has been caused frequently by overwhelming emotion, as terror and anguish.
De Thou tells of a French officer who was in command at Monte Maro in Piedmont in 1552, who sweated blood after he had been threatened with an ignominious execution if he did not surrender the town. The same writer mentions a young Florentine, put to death in Rome during the pontificate of Sixtus V, who sweated blood before execution.
The Society of Arts at Haarlem reported the case of a Danish sailor who sweated blood through terror in a storm. This man was observed carefully by a physician on the ship. The physician at first thought the man had been wounded by a fall, but after wiping away the blood he discovered that the oozing came through uninjured skin. When the storm had ceased the sailor at once regained a healthy condition.
In the French Transactions médicales, for November, 1830, is narrated the case of a young woman who had turned from Protestantism to Catholicism, and after this conversion she grew hysterical because of persecution by her family. During the hysterical attacks she sweat blood from the surface of her cheeks and belly.
Before the Christian era bloody sweat was observed by Aristotle, Galen, Diodorus Siculus, and Lucan also mention such occurrences.
The stigmata of some saints are authenticated cases of bleeding through the sound skin of the hands, feet, and side during extraordinary sympathy with our Lord in His Passion, and deep mental concentration upon that Passion,—the stigmata of Saint Francis of Assisi, for example. Such bleeding is regarded in the Church as miraculous. Apart from any question of faith, there is no reason why they may not be [{349}] miraculous, especially if the supernatural quality is supported by other facts; but, again, such stigmata can be natural. To prove, in general, that stigmata are miraculous requires commonly heroic sanctity as a background, and even then in all cases the proof is not necessarily absolute.
Focachon, a chemist at Charmes, applied postage stamps to the left shoulder of a hypnotised subject, and kept them in place with ordinary sticking plaster and a bandage. He suggested to the patient that he had applied a blister. The subject was watched, and after twenty-four hours the bandage, which had been untouched, was removed. The skin under the postage stamps was thickened, necrotic, of a yellowish-white colour, puffy with the serum of the blood and leucocytes, and surrounded by an intensely red zone of inflammation. Several physicians, including Beaunis, confirmed this observation; and Beaunis made photographs of the blister, which he showed to the Society of Physiological Psychology, June 29, 1885. (Animal Magnetism. Binet and Féré. New York, 1889.)
In Ricard's Journal de magnétisme animal, 2d year, 1840, pp. 18, 151, is a similar case. Prejalmini, in November, 1840, raised a blister on the healthy skin of a somnambulist by a piece of ordinary writing paper on which he had written a prescription for a blister.