At the meeting of the Société de biologie, on July 11, 1885, Bourru and Burot, professors of the Rochefort school, published records of epistaxis and of bloody sweat, produced by suggestion on a male hysteric. On one occasion, after the patient had been hypnotised, his name was traced with the end of a blunt probe on both the patient's forearms. There was, of course, no mark of any kind left on the arms. Then the patient was told: "This afternoon, at four o'clock, you will go to sleep, and blood will then issue from your arms on the lines which I have now traced." The man was paralytic and anaesthetic on the left side. He fell asleep at four o'clock, and while he was asleep the name appeared on the sound left arm, raised in a red wheal, and there were minute drops of complete blood (serum and corpuscles) in several places. There was no change on the paralysed right forearm. Later the patient himself commanded the arm to bleed and it did so. This second occurrence was observed by Mabille. (Binet and Féré. Op. cit., p. 199.) Charcot and his pupils at the Salpêtrière have often produced by suggestion alone the effects of burns upon the skin of hypnotised patients. The blisters in these cases did not appear at once [{350}] but after some hours had elapsed. The blisters, of course, contained blood.
The weekly bleeding, through the unbroken skin, of the hands and feet of Louise Lateau is an example of stigmata in our own day, which may have been supernatural or natural. Physicians would call it natural, an effect of autohypnosis, but there is no reason why it may not have been just as miraculous as the stigmata of the saints. Professor Lefèvre of the University of Louvain, a physician, said her stigmata were miraculous. Theodore Schwann, the discoverer of the cell doctrine, deemed her condition natural.
In the Letters of the Rt. Rev. Casper Borgess, Bishop of Detroit, Michigan, is an account of a visit to Louise Lateau made in July, 1877. He says, "I first seated myself on the only chair in the room, which I had placed at the right side, near the head of the bed. Louise's two hands rested on several thicknesses of folded linen, spread over the bed-cover, and were covered with a folded linen cloth. This I removed. The hands were both heavily covered with blood; in some places it had congealed, and looked very dark; but in the centre, between the fore and little fingers, on the upper part of the hand, the blood was quite fresh and flowed freely. Not knowing at the time that the wiping of the hands causes her intense pain, I proceeded to wipe off the hands, for a more perfect inspection of the wound on each hand. The wound, or stigma, on the right hand seemed more than one inch in length, about half an inch at its greatest width, and was of oval shape. Turning the hand, I saw a wound of the same form in the palm of the hand, and opposite the wound on the back of the same. The blood seemed to rise in bubbles, forming in rapid succession, flowing in a spread stream down to the wrist. Examining the wound itself, I was well convinced that the skin of the hand was not broken nor in any way injured; and there was no sign of a wound made by any material instrument, sharp or dull. And, withal, the blood oozing out of the wound appeared a reality, and complete in form."
The bishop evidently uses the term "wound" in a figurative sense, because he draws attention to the fact that the skin was intact, continuous. She bled from the dorsal and palmar surfaces of the hands in areas shaped like the wounds represented by painters on the hands of our Lord. While the bishop was examining her hands Louise went into an ecstatic condition.
If the Church defines that a bloody sweat or the stigmata of a saint are supernatural, that definition, of course, ends the matter for Catholics as far as the particular case is concerned; [{351}] but until such a decision has been made these conditions are all to be regarded as effects of natural causes working in a natural manner.
In many conditions where the nervous system can have influence a miracle is very difficult of proof from the context. There can, of course, be evident miracles in the cure of some nervous disorders, supposing the diagnosis to be certain. The sudden cure of advanced paresis would be as much a miracle as the sudden replacing of a lost femur. Commonly, however, in neuroses if there is an apparently miraculous healing or similar effect, the supernatural quality can not be established. Suppose Bernadette reported that she had seen the Blessed Virgin at Lourdes: the only safe thing to do in such a case is to deny the apparition until it has been proved. Suppose, secondly, that a patient who has been confined to bed for years by an hysterical paralysis, believed in the reality of the vision, had himself carried to Lourdes, and while at prayer there he suddenly stood up cured. That effect would prove neither the reality of the vision nor the supernatural quality of the cure; nor would it disprove either. We simply can not judge the case, because exactly the same effect has happened hundreds of times from purely natural impressions. If that same paralytic were lying in his bed at home and you set the house afire he would jump up and run.
If the patient, however, had been bedridden with a paralysis caused by certain degeneration of nervous tissue, and he were cured in the manner described, that effect would be supernatural, miraculous; always provided there is no error in the medical diagnosis.
There is a genuine diabetes and a pseudodiabetes. The latter condition may be diagnosed as true diabetes by a number of physicians, but it is only a symptom of hysteria. If the pseudodiabetes is suddenly cured, this cure may or may not be miraculous, but no one can say which is the truth; the probability is a hundred to one that the cure is altogether natural. There was a flourishing Christian Science congregation established in the west recently upon "miraculous" cure of a case of pseudodiabetes, which some ignorant physicians had called true diabetes, notwithstanding the fact that Christian Science does not believe in either diabetes or false diabetes.
We must not, then, call every strange event miraculous; nor, what is worse, are we rashly to make the supernatural a matter to be explained away loftily by the impudence of half science. A Belgian priest named Hahn wrote a monograph [{352}] to the effect that the ecstatic conditions observed in the life of Saint Teresa were autohypnotic, and he succeeded in drawing upon himself the undivided attention of the Congregation of the Index and a serious disturbance of his peace of mind. He became a martyr to science. We all like to be "liberal," impartial; but from the religious Mugwump libera nos, Domine! Autohypnosis is always a mark of degeneracy in the natural order, and to call the ecstacy of a saint autohypnosis not only takes all worth from the manifestation, but the assertion is also untrue. There is a vast difference between the intense intellectual contemplation of a great saint in ecstacy, which leaves the person unconscious of the body and its surroundings, and the cataleptic trance of a neurotic patient who may mimic the saint.
Hypnotic or autohypnotic stigmata, and by stigmata here is meant bleeding from the hands, feet, and side, would be degeneracy of the mind and body in the natural order. Moreover, no clearly established cases are known, because conditions like those of Louise Lateau are by no means certainly physical from all points of view, as they would be if they occurred in an ordinary hysteric. In hypnosis or autohypnosis the subject's mind and body are degenerate; in sanctity, where at times may be displayed certain effects that resemble autohypnosis, there is always a sound mind. A saint may have an unsound, neurotic body, but a crazy "saint" or an hysterical "saint" is no better than any other lunatic or hysteric, and certainly anything but a saint. If a saint has stigmata, these external marks might come (1) miraculously, as a gratuitous sign of divine favour; (2) as an effect of natural, intense contemplation of the Passion of our Lord, producing these bleedings in a sound body; or (3) as an effect of a rational, intense contemplation of the same Passion, acting, more easily, on a neurotic body.