Between Miracle and Sickness: Louise Lateau and the Experience of Stigmata and Ecstasy

Soe Lachapelle University of Guelph

When, on the last Friday of April 1868, Louise Lateau began bleeding from the left side of her chest, the eighteen-year-old girl was advised by her local priest to keep quiet and forget about the wound. But the bleeding occurred again on the following Friday, this time accompanied by wounds on her feet. The third Friday, wounds appeared on both hands. This time, Lateau could no longer hide the blood; her secret was out. From Friday, July 17, thirteen weeks after the stigmatas rst appearance, she experienced a state of ecstasy in which she witnessed scenes of the Passion and shared her saviors sufferings. On Friday, September 25, she developed stigmata on her head, small cuts forming a bloody crown. These awe-inspiring feats continued for months and years. Over time, Lateaus experiences intensied; she stopped reacting to either heat or cold, she stopped sleeping, and she began to refuse any food or water other than the daily communion. In the spring of 1873, she received her nal mark: a large wound on her shoulder, recalling Jesuss burden when carrying his cross to Mount Golgotha. The wounds did not affect her daily life. Miraculously, it seemed, she was able to continue her work as a seamstress, participate in household activities, and walk to church every morningat least until 1876, when, having grown visibly weaker, she was forced to renounce her daily visit to the village church. Her health declined, but she continued to exhibit marks of the passion every Friday. From 1879 onward she remained bedridden, until her death in 1883 at the signicant age of thirty-three.1
1. Accounts of the development of Lateaus stigmata and ecstasy are found in most works on her. For example, see F. Lefbvre, Louise Lateau de Bois-dHaine. Sa vie. Ses exCongurations, 2004, 12:77105 2005 by The Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for Literature and Science.

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Between 1868 and 1883, physicians, members of the clergy, believers, and curious visitors traveled to Bois-dHaine, Louise Lateaus small Belgian village, to witness the famous stigmatic. Many of them wrote accounts of their observations that tell her story from various and sometimes-conicting perspectives. This paper is mainly based on a dozen works, both rst- and second-hand accounts. Because Lateau herself never wrote, and because her biographers rarely reported her words, what has been left behind is a set of rich but confusing material in which her character, her mystical experience, and her surroundings remain unstable. The central gure of all these accounts occupies an ambiguous position, and displays multifarious identities: as a person of simple intellect; as a suggestible victim, manipulated by her family and religious surroundings; as a deceitful girl, lying about the nature of her wounds and faking her ecstasies; as a hysteric belonging to a hospital ward; or as a saint to whom God had granted the ultimate gift of suffering. In this paper I attempt to situate Lateau within a complex conguration of science and religionin the dialogue, cooperation, and antagonism between the two at the end of the nineteenth century. Her story is one in which faith and the various religious, medical, and psychiatric interests constructed a same subject. It illuminates anxieties regarding religious experiences and suggests limits to the scientic explanation. It is an example in which scientic discomfort was soon replaced by ridicule, and explanation by classication. The paper is organized into four sections, more or less chronological: in the rst, I present the religious and social context and the reactions of believers and religious authorities at various clergy levels; in the second, I consider the opinions of Catholic physicians who openly professed their faith in the Church of Rome; the third section centers on the sixteenmonth discussion on Lateaus case held at the Acadmie royale de mdecine de Belgique in 1874 and 1875. In the nal section I present Lateau as a hysteric in the context of nineteenth-century psychiatry.

I. Gifts from God

Over the last twenty years, historians have been reacting to the claim that the second half of the nineteenth century was a period of
tases. Ses stigmates. tude mdicale, 2nd ed. (Louvain: Peeters, 1873), pp. 2249; Augustus Rohling, Louise Lateau: Her Stigmas and Ecstasy (New York: Hickey, 1876), pp. 812, 2629, 4546; Henri Van Looy, Biographie de Louise Lateau. La stigmatise de Bois-dHaine daprs les documents authentiques, 4th ed. (Tournai: diteur pontical, imprimeur de lvch, 1879), pp. 74117 (hereafter cited as Van Looy, Biographie); Dr. Warlomont, Rapport de la Commission qui a t charge dexaminer le travail de M. le docteur Charbonnier, Bulletin de lAcadmie royale de mdecine 9 (1875): 146152.

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secularization in Europe. While church attendance dropped and atheism, positivism, and scientism were dominant trends of the time, the nineteenth century, particularly its second half, was also a vibrant period for Catholicism. The papacies of Pius IX and Leo XIII were both marked by important changes, the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and Papal Infallibility being the most prominent. At the popular level, spiritual beliefs were made tangible through physical evidence of the supernatural. Stigmatics, ecstatics, visionaries, and miraculously cured persons were an important part of the spiritual landscape of the period. The rich, mystical character of the second half of the nineteenth century is now well established. Lateaus experiences belong to this world in which the supernatural was often concretized, a period in which the Virgin Mary addressed believers, the dead communicated with the living at sances, and communities found themselves in the grasp of epidemics of demonic possession. Religious authorities reacted and adapted to these phenomena in ways that illuminate the periods religious struggles and anxieties.2
2. Owen Chadwicks classic argument for the secularization of Europe during this period is The Secularization of European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). For continental Europe, a revision has been mostly undertaken by studies of French history. Late-nineteenth-century France witnessed a spiritual revival in urban centers, apparent in the construction of new sites of worship, the most important being the Sacr-Coeur in Paris: see Raymond A. Jonas, Restoring a Sacred Center: Pilgrimage, Politics, and the Sacr-Coeur, Historical Reections 20 (1994): 95123; Thomas Kselman, The Varieties of Religious Experience in Urban France, in European Religion in the Age of Great Cities, 18301930, ed. Hugh McLeod (London/New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 165190. Moreover, the supernaturals hold on the French population, particularly in the countryside, did not recede: Judith Devlin, The Superstitious Mind: French Peasants and the Supernatural in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). Starting with Catherine Labours sight of the Virgin Mary in Paris in the 1830s, Marian apparitions and prophetic visions occurred frequently during the century: Barbara Corrado Pope, Immaculate and Powerful: The Marian Revival in the Nineteenth Century, in Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality, ed. Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret R. Miles (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), pp. 173200; Thomas Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth-Century France (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983); Sandra L. Zimdars-Swarty, Encountering Mary: From La Salette to Medjugorje (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). Holy apparitions sometimes led to the building of shrines and the establishment of pilgrimage traditions: Suzanne K. Kaufman, Selling Lourdes: Pilgrimage, Tourism, and the MassMarketing of the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century France, in Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America, ed. Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), pp. 6388; Michael R. Marrus, Cultures on the Move: Pilgrims and Pilgrimages in NineteenthCentury France, Stanford French Review 1 (1977): 205220. The most famous site was Lourdes, where Marys apparition to Bernadette in 1858 led to the development of a

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Stigmatics were not a nineteenth-century novelty: reports of such occurrences can be traced back to the thirteenth century.3 Lateau is one of many mystics who received the wounds of Christ, and her experience was, in most respects, typical. Like most stigmatics, she was a woman, poor, with a reserved and humble behavior; before the appearance of the rst wound, she was unusually fervent, extremely devoted to Jesus and God, and particularly preoccupied with the story of the Passion. She had a history of severe illness, miraculously cured with the onset of the stigmata; she did not believe she required

shrine: Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1999); Suzanne K. Kaufman, Miracles, Medicine and the Spectacle of Lourdes: Popular Religion and Modernity in Fin-de-Sicle France (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1996). The concretization of the supernatural occurred in other ways. For example, from 1857 to 1877, claims of demonic possession in Morzine were brought to the attention of the French state: Jacqueline Carroy, Le mal de Morzine: De la possession lhystrie (18571877) (Paris: Solin, 1981); Ruth Harris, Possession on the Borders: The Mal de Morzine in Nineteenth-Century France, Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 451478; Laurence Maire, Les possdes de Morzine (18571873) (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1981). Finally, the importance of the supernatural in a world becoming increasingly rational is apparent in the revival of an occultist tradition and the popularity of sances during the nineteenth century: Nicole Edelman, Voyantes, gurisseuses et visionnaires: Somnambules et mdiums en France, 17851914 (Paris: Michel, 1995); Soe Lachapelle, A World Outside Science: French Attitudes toward Mediumistic Phenomena, 18531931 (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2002); Christopher McIntosh, Eliphas Lvi and the French Occult Revival (London: Rider, 1972); John Monroe, Evidence of Things Not Seen: Spiritism, Occultism, and the Search for a Modern Faith in France, 18531925 (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2002); Lynn S. Sharp, Rational Religion, Irrational Science: Men, Women, and Belief in French Spiritism, 18531914 (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine, 1996). The revision of the secularization thesis has begun for the rest of continental Europe. In his study of an 1870s Marian apparition in the Saarland, David Blackbourn shows Germany to be still strongly in the grip of supernatural beliefs: David Blackbourn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York: Knopf, 1994). Finally, for a treatment of religion in the face of nineteenth-century urbanization across Europe, see McLeod, European Religion (above, this note). 3. In 1224, Francis of Assisi became the rst recognized stigmatic. There is an earlier tradition of self-inicted stigmata as a means to empathize with Christ; it is only with Assisi, however, that the claim is made that stigmata are produced outside the agency of the bearer, as a gift from God. On the history of stigmatization, see Joachim Boufet, Les stigmatiss (Paris: Cerf, 1996); Ted Harrison, Stigmata: A Medieval Mystery in a Modern Age (New York: Penguin Books, 1996). An outdated but nonetheless interesting treatment of the topic is Ren Biot, The Enigma of the Stigmata (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1962). For medical studies suggesting a link between religious stigmata and psychophysiological processes, see Xavier Ably, Stigmatisation mystique, Socit MdicoPsychologique (17 December 1962): 100107; F. A. Whitlock and J. V. Hynes, Religious Stigmatization: An Historical and Psychophysiological Enquiry, Psychological Medicine 8 (1978): 185202.

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food or sleep; and her desire to suffer for her faith brought her, every week, to relive the Passion of Christ, and to do so in terrible pain.4 Accounts of the earlier parts of Lateaus life are found in every work on her, with more or less emphasis on the incessant suffering and misery she had to endure before the onset of the stigmata. Not surprisingly, it is in devotional literature that her experience with pain and her acceptance of it are at their strongest. This sections narrative is based, in large part, on the works of Augustus Rohling and Henri Van Looy, two authors convinced of the miraculous nature of their subjects experience and clearly intent on convincing their readers of this; the language is thus, at times, devotional, and the feats may be exaggerated.5 If this makes for a compelling read, it also makes it difcult to untangle the ctions in this story. For example, it is easy to imagine how Lateaus navet and purity and the clergys early skepticism could bring further support to the claim of an intervention from God; at the same time, this can be said of any account on Lateau, and physicians would not fail to present the girl in a light that would bring greater support to their own claims about the feats. What we are sometimes left with is thus more a matter of degrees of certitude than of facts. Anne-Louise Lateau was born on January 30, 1850, in Bois-dHaine, a French-speaking village of about 1,500 inhabitants, situated in the
4. When providing the prole of a typical stigmatic, Whitlock and Hynes base their description, in large parts, on Lateau, claiming her to be typical: Whitlock and Hynes, Religious Stigmatization (above, n. 3), pp. 187189. Other popular examples of nineteenth-century stigmatics include Catherine Emmerich (17741824), Marie-Julie Jahenny (18501941), Palma Matarelli (18251888), Marie de Moerl (18121868), and Theresa Neumann (18981962). 5. I have not been able to nd information on Van Looy. In his preface, he presents his work as neither too enthusiastic nor too skepticalalthough the book certainly reads like an apology for its subject. Van Looy also emphasizes that his work lls a need for an account of Lateau from an author who is both Belgian and interested in looking beyond the physical phenomena and into the spirituality of the girl: Van Looy, Biographie, pp. 78. As for Rohling, a Catholic and renowned anti-Semite, his short pamphlet on Lateau was written in 1874, after his polemical Des Talmudjudel, a book that attacked the Talmud and contributed to the perpetuation of Jewish hatred, and the pamphlet was not free of Semitic references. It was addressed to Jews and Christians of every denomination, and opened with a commentary by the author suggesting uses of this work for his various audiences: for Catholics, he began, a tale of miracles demonstrated by the strongest scientic evidence would strengthen an already-present faith; for Protestants, he continued, it would hopefully inspire a return to the Church of Rome and salvation; for Jews, it offered the possibility of redemption if they chose to open their eyes and join the Church of Rome; and nally, for the indels, the work might give them the strength to open their conscience to the truth: Rohling, Louise Lateau, pp. 34.

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Hainaut, close to the French border. She was the third and last child of her family, born when her eldest sister, Rosina, was six years old, and the middle daughter, Adelina, was two. Louises father, Grgoire Lateau, a workman in one of the iron plants near the village, died of smallpox two months after the birth of his third child. Her mother, Adle, became very sick after Louises birth and for the next three years she was bedridden. Van Looys account emphasizes the misery of the early days of the child, left to herself in a house with two sick parents and two very young siblings. It was God, he claimed, who wished to accustom the girl early on to the suffering she would later be asked to endure. With Grgoires death and Adles inability to hold a job, there was little food on the table and the family lived in a state of extreme poverty; in the harsh winters they had no re and only a few blankets with which to keep warm.6 The tale of horrors continued: at the age of two, Louise almost drowned but was rescued by her mother, moments before death. At fourteen, she was stamped on by a cow, leaving her with a bent back. Wishing to suffer in heroic silence, she decided to keep quiet about the accident; for three weeks she endured internal injuries, before a serious illness forced her to confess her secret.7 Devotional literature on Lateau speaks with admiration of her care of the sick. It was not only her own suffering that fascinated the girl, but that of others as well. Already at the age of eight she was helping an old disabled woman in the village. At the age of twelve she went to live with an ailing aunt in the next town and stayed there for two years, caring for her until her death. She was then sent to Brussels to care for another elderly lady, but soon returned to BoisdHaine after her accident with the cow. It was during the cholera epidemic of 1866, however, that Lateaus devotion to the sick was said to have been noticed by those around her. She was sixteen years old when the epidemic arrived in Bois-dHaine. A great emphasis is placed on her courage and generosity in the face of disease. After the
6. Given the critical economic situation in the Hainaut at the time, however, this would probably not have been uncommon. On this, see, for example, Georges H. Dumont, La vie quotidienne en Belgique sous le rgne de Lopold II (18651909) (Paris: Hachette, 1974), pp. 7499; Odette Hardy-Hemery, Statuts professionnels et mobilit sociale (18151880): Les petites villes du Hainaut Franais en voie dindustrialisation, Annales de dmographie historique 1 (1999): 181218; Commandant Michaux, La crise conomique de 1840 1860 dans quatre villages du sud du Hainaut: FroidlachapelleSivry RanceMontbliart, analyse de documents (Brussels: Pro Civitate, 1968); Henri Pirenne, La place du Hainaut dans lhistoire de Belgique (Frameries/Mons: Union des imprimeries, 1929). 7. For details on Lateaus childhood, see, for example, Van Looy, Biographie, pp. 1220.

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stigmata appeared, villagers would remember these rst heroic actions of the young girl.8 Much was said on Lateaus lack of education and her ignorance of the profound meaning of the phenomena taking hold of her. Van Looy claimed that the girl had no knowledge of the nature of stigmata prior to April 1868, a fact that was later questioned by a member of the Acadmie royale de mdecine. Lateau may have attended school for only six months, just long enough to prepare for her rst communion, but the fact that she entered the Tiers ordre of Saint Francis of Assisi in 1867 and made her profession a year later makes it unlikely that she had never heard of stigmata; after all, she was in an order dedicated to the rst recorded stigmatic.9 Both Van Looy and Rohling recount the onset of the stigmata in a dramatic tone. A year before the signs appeared, Lateau, now seventeen, inexplicably became very sick. The cause of this long illness was never discovered, although it was suspected to be a consequence of her devotion to the victims of the cholera epidemic a year earlier. In any case, in the early months of 1867 she began to suffer severe headaches, intense body pain, and loss of appetite. Her health continued to decline, and by September she was thought to be almost lost; the last rites were administered to her, but she recoveredmiraculously. For three weeks, Lateaus health returned, but then she relapsed. The headaches intensied. She began to experience pains in her left arm, side, and leg. In January 1868, an abscess formed under her shoulder. By March 1868a month before the stigmata were to appearshe began spitting blood. The villages physician became convinced that his patient was truly lost. On April 15, at her own request, she again received the last rites. Soon after, however, she became convinced that her time had not yet come, that her prayers had been answered, and that she would be kept alive to help her mother and to further suffer in the name of God. Six days later, on the morning of April 21, Lateau had regained enough strength to walk to the village church and receive communion. (That same day, she menstruated for the rst time in her life.)10
8. The cholera epidemic of 1866 counted thirty thousand victims in Belgium, including fourteen in Bois-dHaine: Dumont, La vie quotidienne (above, n. 6), p. 80; Lefbvre, Louise Lateau (above, n. 1), p. 17. On Lateaus feats during the epidemic, see Rohling, Louise Lateau, p. 6; Van Looy, Biographie, pp. 1824, 3032. 9. Van Looy, Biographie, pp. 2027, 74; Dr. Warlomont, Discussion des travaux suivants: La stigmatise dAnvers, par M. Desguin.Maladies des mystiques; Louise Lateau, par M. Charbonnier.Rapport de la Commission qui a t charge dexaminer le mmoire de M. le docteur Charbonnier, intitul: Maladies et facults diverses des mystiques, Bulletin de lAcadmie royale de mdecine 9 (1875): 780. 10. Lefbvre, Louise Lateau (above, n. 1), p. 120.

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Her ordeal was not over. Three days later, the pains returned. That Friday, the rst stigma appeared on the left side of her chest; the next day, however, the pain had disappeared and the bleeding had ceased. On the following Friday, Lateaus feet began to bleed. The girl went to see her confessor, Bois-dHaines priest, M. Niels, who later recalled having failed to recognize the wounds as stigmata and having advised the girl not to pay attention to them. On May 8, Lateau went to see Dr. Gonne, the villages physician, with wounds on her chest, feet, and hands. Gonne, who by now was very familiar with his patient, having treated her for many years, understandably took this to be a new episode in her long series of illnesses. He treated her until June, attempting to stop the ow of blood. When Lateau and her family became convinced that this was not a simple illness but an experience of a truly mystical character, they decided to cease treatments, thereby ending all relations with the offended doctor.11 At some point during that summer, Niels informed the bishop of Tournay of Lateaus stigmata; the bishop decided to wait before pronouncing himself on the matter. In late August, Lateau was introduced to Msgr. Deschamps, the archbishop of Mechlin. Deschamps was so impressed by his interview with the girl that he later revealed his conviction that she was a saint. On August 28, he came in person to witness one of Lateaus Friday episodes; once more, he proclaimed his belief that this was the work of God. After this visit, the bishop of Tournay ordered a formal investigation to be opened at once.12 News of Lateaus Friday stigmata spread quickly across the country and the Catholic world, bringing fame to the village. In the spring of 1869, believers began to show up in Bois-dHaine in the hope of being received on Fridays into the modest home of the Lateau family; many came from Belgium, but also from France, Germany, Italy, and the United States. On one Good Friday, approximately one hundred visitors walked through the home while the bishop of Tournay in person showed the girls wounded hands to the public.13 Anyone could be admitted into the house during one of Lateaus ecstasies, but the high number of requests and the limited space inside the house made it necessary for pilgrims to send written requests before their visit. Overcoming his initial apparent skepticism, the priest of Bois-dHaine rapidly changed his mind and took on the important role of granting permissions for those who would
11. On the onset of the stigmata, see Rohling, Louise Lateau, pp. 59; Van Looy, Biographie, pp. 3346. 12. Van Looy, Biographie, pp. 132133. 13. Ibid., pp. 141146.

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be received on Fridays. According to him, no particular admission criteria were applied, and money was never acceptedin fact, Louises mother and sisters were said to shut the door on those trying to get into the house by offering money. The fact that the family did not welcome these visits was emphasized. As Lateaus reputation continued to grow, however, and as more pilgrims traveled to witness her feats, her family dutifully complied with Niels and other clergy members wish that visitors be allowed.14 For her audience, the sight of Lateaus ecstasy was impressive. On Friday mornings, she would be found sewing at her machine, blood from her hand-wounds already dripping on her work. Rohling recalled:
No spectacle could be more impressive than that which is now presented. The bleeding coronet on her forehead; the blood trickling down over her face and falling on her dress; her hands, the blood dropping on the oor where it lies in large patches; the circle of by-standers of every rank and condition grouped around, speechless with awe and wonder, many of them weeping with emotionall this combines to form a scene which irresistibly forces upon the beholder the conclusion that it is the work of God.15

It was not only the blood that was impressive. While in a state of ecstasy, Lateau was said to possess particular abilities that, when tested, provided even more of a spectacle for her audience. For example, she supposedly could be recalled out of her trance by a member of the clergy or by anyone granted such power by a clerical authority, and this even if she had been unaware of the transfer. She was also said to recognize objects blessed by the church. If an unblessed medal were placed before her lips, for example, her features would remain xed; once the same medal had been secretly blessed, however, she would smile when presented with the object once again. There were other abilities. For example, although she knew only French, she was said to discern between prayers and other texts in foreign languages: like the blessed medal, prayers read in foreign languages would draw forth a joyful smile. Lateaus suffering was also a source of wonder. Some claimed that
14. Rohling, Louise Lateau, pp. 2324; Van Looy, Biographie, pp. 137138. 15. Rohling, Louise Lateau, pp. 2627. There is no doubt that Lateau provided a spectacle for her public, but she never pushed this to the extent that other stigmatics did. Contrary to Theresa Neumann, who allowed pictures of her wounds and her bed covered with blood to be taken and circulated, Lateau was congratulated by her promoters for opposing this sort of spectacle: Lefbvre, Louise Lateau (above, n. 1), p. 67. On Neumann, see, for example, Ennemond Boniface, Thrse Neumann: La crucie de Konnersreuth devant lhistoire et la science (Paris: Dessain et Tolra, 1979); Joachim Boufet, Thrse Neumann ou le paradoxe de la saintet (Paris: ditions du rocher, 1999).

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it intensied on days dedicated to saints, on days commemorating the suffering of Jesus, or at times during which crimes were committed against the Catholic Church. In particular, two events testied to this ability: the entrance of Piedmonts army in Rome on September 20, 1870, and the Communes desecration of the church in Paris during the Holy Week of 1871on both occasions, Lateau was said to have suffered more intensely than usual, even though she was presumed to have been unaware of the events. Although both Rohling and Van Looy clearly believed in Lateaus power of discernment, other accounts put it into strong doubt. Eventually, feeling that her abilities had been abused, Lateau refused to display them.16 Catholics everywhere saw Lateaus stigmata and ecstasy as a symbol of their oppression and a conrmation of their faith. She had begun to exhibit her marks at a time of tension between Catholics, Protestants, and liberals. Pope Pius IX had taken a strong stance on spiritual matters: his doctrine of Immaculate Conception in 1854 was followed by the doctrine of Papal Infallibility, proclaimed in 1870 at the First Vatican Council. Politically, however, the Vaticans power seemed to be weakening; that same year, unable to prevent the unication of Italy, the pope was forced to retire to the Vatican, now a prisoner in the relics of his former state. In France, the situation was different. Defeat in the Franco-Prussian war led to the fall of the Second Empire and the creation of the Third Republic, which in the rst decade of its existence was very conservative. Discussions about a return of the monarchy, led by the comte de Chambord, dominated the Catholic agenda in the 1870s. Mystical prophecies about Frances future were of great interest in this context, and, like others, Lateau was questioned about the eventual return of the monarchy in France.17 In Germany, news of her stigmata arrived in the context of another newly unied country, with its own religious
16. Rohling, Louise Lateau, pp. 12, 2830; Van Looy, Biographie, pp. 122125, 162173; Marcel Florkin, ed., Lettres de Thodore Schwann (Lige: Socit royale des sciences de Lige, 1961), pp. 156158. 17. Unlike other mystics, Lateau was never interested in prophecies. When asked about the comte de Chambord, she simply smiled and failed to answer: Joachim Boufet, Avant-propos, in idem, La stigmatisation (Grenoble: Millon, 1996), pp. 1011. Prophecies abounded at the end of the nineteenth century and constituted an important part of the spiritual landscape. See, for example, lAbb E.-A. Chabauty, Lettres sur les prophties modernes et concordance de toutes les prdictions jusquau rgne dHenri V inclusivement, 2nd ed. (Poitiers: Oudin, 1872), on prophecies and the hope of a monarchical restoration; lAbb J.-M. Curique, Voix prophtiques ou signes, apparitions et prdictions recueillis principalement des annales de lglise touchant les grands vnements du XIXme sicle et lapproche de la n des temps, 3rd ed. (Paris: Palm, 1871). Curiques work includes a section on Lateau (pp. 208229).

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crisis. To Catholics experiencing repression during the Kulturkampf, Lateau provided a weapon through concrete evidence of their faith.18 At home in Belgium, news of Lateaus exploits came in its own particular context. In 1870, Belgium was still a young country, created in 1830 after the Flemings and Walloons unied and gained independence from the United Netherlands. Originally, Belgium had been created by an alliance between liberals and Catholics. In 1870, however, the Catholic party won the elections and thereby the control of the government; its strong hold on the Belgian government lasted throughout King Leopold IIs reign (18651909). While Catholics enjoyed a comfortable position in the affairs of the state, they were facing a decline in religious practice. To counter this trend, the Belgian clergy began to encourage new pilgrimages and to revive old ones. Lateau was no doubt part of this attempt to inspire the Belgian population with a greater religious sense. Her devotion, her humility, and her stigmata and ecstasy were potentially useful to the clergy if presented in a manner that could inspire believers and rekindle faith.19

II. The Catholic Physicians

Lateaus story is particularly interesting because it occurred at a time when the medical establishment was increasingly inserting itself, and being accepted, into an intellectual territory traditionally dominated by the Catholic Church. Ruth Harris and Suzanne Kaufman have argued that during the second half of the nineteenth century, the language on miracles shifted from an old concern with the soul of the subjectwith his or her devotion, and with the conversion or strengthened faith resulting from a miraculous experience to a new concern with the physical effects of the miracle, with the body of the receiver. By the end of the century, the physiological processes behind the phenomenon were emphasized, making what could be seen as an intrusion of the medical establishment into the religious scene acceptable, and even necessary. Interest in the medical observation of miraculous events came from both sides: while the church appealed to scientic authority, physicians showed a
18. Rohlings work is clearly written in this context. 19. On religion in Belgium during this period, see Dumont, La vie quotidienne (above, n. 6), pp. 112128; Val R. Lorwin, Belgium: Religion, Class, and Language in National Politics, in Political Oppositions in Western Democracies, ed. Robert Dahl (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); Carl Strikwerda, A House Divided: Catholics, Socialists, and Flemish Nationalists in Nineteenth-Century Belgium (Lanham: Rowman and Littleeld, 1997); idem, A Resurgent Religion: The Rise of Catholic Social Movements in NineteenthCentury Belgian Cities, in McLeod, European Religion (above, n. 2), pp. 6189.

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growing interest in the physiology underlying the supernatural. The rising popularity of scientic explanations stimulated both the churchs openness toward scientic collaboration and the medical establishments need to prove the superiority of the scientic method in all spheres of human activity, including matters of faith.20 Thus, when the local bishop ordered a formal investigation into the Lateau phenomena in 1868, he requested the participation of both ecclesiastic and medical authorities in the process.21 The appointed commission consisted of four theologians and various professors from faculties of medicine in universities around Belgium. Ferdinand Lefbvre, a professor of general pathology and therapeutics at the Universit Catholique de Louvain and a member of the Acadmie royale de mdecine de Belgique, headed the commissions medical section; he and the rest of the medical commission were to examine the girl and establish whether the stigmata and the episodes of ecstasy could be explained in either fraudulent or medical terms. The investigation began on September 4, 1868, and lasted a year. During this time, Lateau received the visit of ve to six physicians on average each Friday, and as many as fteen during some of her episodes.22 Between November 1869 and February 1870, Lefbvre published his results in four installments of the Revue catholique.
20. Physicians have been included in the proceedings of canonization since the Middle Ages, but the role of medicine in religious enquiries became more important during the nineteenth century. The intrusion of the scientic into the religious has been discussed mostly in regard to Lourdes. In her book on the history of the apparitions and the shrine, Ruth Harris points out that physicians were an important part of the story of Lourdes from its beginning, both because of their own interest in explaining the supernatural and because of the churchs intent to bring scientic credibility to the shrine: Harris, Lourdes (above, n. 2), pp. 320356. In her dissertation on the shrine, Suzanne Kaufman has argued that in their ght against superstition, physicians in fact contributed to its legitimization by acknowledging the reality of certain phenomena: Kaufman, Miracles (above, n. 2), pp. 147321. More recently, Jason Szabo has focused on the complexities of the mutual rapprochement between church and science in the story of Lourdes: Jason Szabo, Seeing Is Believing? The Form and Substance of French Medical Debates over Lourdes, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76 (2002): 199230. For a discussion of the traditional role of physicians in the canonization process, see Joseph Ziegler, Practitioners and Saints: Medical Men in Canonization Processes in the Thirteenth to Fifteenth Centuries, Social History of Medicine 12 (1999): 191225. 21. This collaboration between scientic and religious authorities was perhaps more amicable in Belgium than elsewhere. Compared to France, where Catholic universities were allowed only after 1875 and never attained much recognition for their faculties of science, the Belgian universities of Louvain and Lige were prestigious institutions. On French Catholic universities, see Harry Paul, From Knowledge to Power: The Rise of the Science Empire in France, 18601939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 221250. 22. Van Looy, Biographie, pp. 134138.

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Then, feeling that the universal character of his studies required a more general publication, rather than one aimed at the scientic world exclusively,23 he produced a three-hundred-page book. Louise Lateau de Bois-dHaine opens with a biographical account; this is followed by a presentation of the witnessed facts, and a discussion and rejectionof the possibility of fraud; and the book ends with an attempt to provide the phenomena with a scientic explanation. Lefbvre, nding himself incapable of constructing such an explanation with the concepts of physiology, concluded that Lateaus phenonema could possibly be miraculous in nature. His work was pivotal. For Catholic writers, it became the denitive scientic account on the Belgian stigmatic, while other scientists took it as the starting-point for their own investigations. Lefbvres account provides a clear description of the diverse marks witnessed on Lateaus body. The Friday wounds left no, or very few, traces during the weekit was only on Thursdays that the symptoms became apparent. First, blisters developed on her hands and feet; at some point during the night, the blisters broke, and a transparent liquid was then evacuated, followed by blood, which continued to ow out all day Friday. The chest wound created more of a problem for medical observations: respect for Lateaus modesty prevented Lefbvre from observing her chest at any time except on four occasions when the girl was in a state of ecstasy (Lateau, then unaware of the examination, had been without a sense of shame, the physician wrote to justify himself). Because of this, it was impossible for Lefbvre to establish more than the fact that bleeding occurred between the fth and sixth ribs and appeared to emanate from three minute points, one centimeter apart. No blisters were observed on this region of Lateaus body. As for her head, no wounds were ever visible until blood started to seep out of various points on her forehead; once the bleeding began, Lefbvre was able to observe a few small scratches on the skinalmost invisible to the naked eyefrom which the blood appeared to come. Strangely, he noticed, the stigmata that had been bleeding for hours on Friday would always dry up and almost disappear by Saturday, and would not develop again until the following Thursday.24 Lefbvre also reported careful observation of Lateau while in her state of ecstasy. Initially, the ecstasies started early in the morning and lasted for nine to twelve hours without interruption, but their length diminished with the years. During the greater part of the ec23. Lefbvre, Louise Lateau (above, n. 1), pp. viiiix. 24. Ibid., pp. 2435.

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stasy, Louise remained in her chair, immobile, bleeding hands resting on her lap, her forehead bloody, and her eyes looking up as if absorbed in a deep contemplation. Her facial expressions varied between profound happiness and extreme fear. After a few hours, she would fall on her knees, hands together and body in a forward position, for about half an hour before resuming her initial position. Then, at half past two, she would fall on the oor, face on the ground, supported by her left arm, and eyes closed. At exactly three in the afternoon, she would adopt the position of crucixion, arms stretched and feet crossed. After an hour or two, she would resume a praying attitude and, nally, go back to her initial position. From there, she slowly woke up and regained her composure.25 During her trances, Lateau would experience tremendous suffering that she claimed to desire in the name of God, who had been kind enough to grant her this wish beyond anything she could have imagined.26 When asked what she prayed for, she answered: Formerly . . . my chief prayer was that I might be allowed to suffer, now, I ask God above all things that his holy will may be done, even if my sufferings should be doubled.27 Modeling her courage to accept suffering on that of Jesus, Lateau was proud to bear the wounds of Christ on her own body.28 She found true contentment in suffering: The desire to suffer is as if hankered in her heart . . . and what is even more inexplicable is that the more she suffers, the happier and satised she gets, the more she wants to suffer, wrote Van Looy.29 Her wish was granted:
As described by herself, she feels as if a band of red-hot iron were bound around her head, pressing against it with enormous force. And the slightest touch upon her forehead redoubles her agony. The wound in her shoulder is so painful, that she describes herself as feeling unable to sustain the weight of her head; it deprives her eyes of their wonted vivacity, and exhausts her strength to such a degree, that she is unable to recognize a person at a distance of a yard or two.30

Lateau had asked to be the subject of God, to be granted the experience of pain in his name. Simultaneously, she became the sub25. Ibid., pp. 4043; Rohling, Louise Lateau, pp. 2627. 26. Van Looy, Biographie, pp. 17, 42. 27. Rohling, Louise Lateau, p. 51. 28. Van Looy, Biographie, p. 36. 29. Ibid., p. 161. 30. Rohling, Louise Lateau, p. 12.

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ject of physicians, suffering in the name of science. In order to understand the phenomena and to remove the possibility of fraud, Lefbvre and others experimented on her. Her sufferings at the hands of God were mirrored by these experiments performed by physicians, some of them painful and humiliating. Lefbvre himself felt the need to justify his experiments of a somewhat cruel character by afrming his conviction that the subject was completely insensible in her state of ecstasy and thus unable to feel pain.31 If Lateau was a fraud, somehow producing her own wounds, then it followed that physicians could reproduce them. Lefbvre did several experiments to nd out if he could obtain identical stigmata by articial means; pouring ammonia on the girls hands, for example, produced lesions that were similar to the stigmata, but not identical. He continued to experiment on his subject. One week, he sealed her hands with specially designed gloves, putting them on on Wednesday, making sure that she could not slide objects into the gloves and reach her palms. When, on the following Friday, the wax seals were broken and the gloves taken off, blood had already begun to come out of Lateaus hands in the usual fashion. He concluded that the stigmata appeared even when no possible contact had taken place. As for the ecstasies, if they were genuine, then it had to be the case that Lateaus sensibility was reduced to nothing during those times. By taunting the girls nose with a feather, forcing her to breathe in ammonia, and stimulating her skin, even her face, with needles, Lefbvre tried to ascertain his subjects level of sensibility. After multiple experiments, he became convinced that she was completely insensible except on her eyelids, which would move slightly when touched with a nger or when rapidly approached with a hand.32 More spectacularly, to assure himself that Lateau was not faking insensitivity in her state of ecstasy, Lefbvre sent strong electric currents through her body, observing no effects on the girl.33 Once the hypothesis of fraud had been dismissed and the phenomena observed and experimented upon sufciently, the Friday episodes required a medical explanation.34 If Lateau was sick, the dis31. Lefbvre, Louise Lateau (above, n. 1), pp. 5152. 32. Ibid., pp. 4853. 33. Ibid., pp. 7278. 34. There are few traces of direct accusations of fraud by Lateau. Van Looy mentions one instance in which Lateau was suspected of faking her ecstasies and provoking her wounds: One of her observers would often spy on her through the keyhole and come in and out of her room suddenly, trying to catch her. One Friday night, he caught her playing with a needle in her hands: Van Looy, Biographie, pp. 150152. The fact that

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ease should be classied; but what should it be classied as? Where was the stigmatics place in the physicians world? Lateaus stigmata were characterized by their spontaneity, their periodicity, and their specic location: they were spontaneous because blood owed without any external intervention, they were periodic because the bleeding occurred every Friday and only on Fridays, and they were specic in their location: because they occurred at the same spots on the body week after week.35 Lefbvre, seeking to classify this disease, was able to nd no clear analogy between Lateaus case and cases of hemorrhages or neurosis. He was thus forced to accept the limits of medical explanation and to leave the matter open for the clerical authorities to decide. His purposethat of observing the phenomena, judging their sincerity, and attempting to nd similarities with contemporary medical conditionshad been fullled.36 In March 1869, Lefbvre asked his former professor Theodor Schwann, then holding a position at the Universit de Lige, to collaborate with him in his enquiry on Lateau.37 Because of his reputation in the scientic community and the world at large, many wished Schwanns participation. Moreover, his strong Catholic faith made him an ideal choice for the church: It is your control in condentiality that I would like to have. You are a great scientic authority. You are impartial and you are Christian, wrote the brother of the archbishop to Schwann. The latter accepted, on the condition that Lateau be isolated from her family during his observation; the clergy denied the request in the name of dignity and liberty. Before the matter could go further, however, Schwann was invited to visit Lateau in her home in an unofcial way. He arrived in Bois-dHaine on Friday, March 26. Lefbvre, the bishop of Tournay, Niels, and a few other members of the clergy accompanied him. When asked what would convince him of the authenticity of the phenomena, Schwann said that Lateaus supposed ability to recognize a member of the church or someone blessed by the church during her ecstasy and wake up, if shown to be true, would convince him. The experiment was a complete failure: Lateau woke up when not supposed to,
Lateau was a seamstress by profession implies that she had easy access to needles and scissors, but, to my knowledge, observers never remarked on this fact. 35. Lefbvre, Louise Lateau (above, n. 1), pp. 107109. 36. Ibid., pp. 272275. 37. Of German origins, Theodor Schwann became professor at Louvain in 1838; he left for Lige in 1848. He is recognized for his work on muscle contraction, fermentation, and putrefaction, and for his discovery of pepsin; above all, he is considered one of the founders of the cell theory, identifying cells as the fundamental particles of life.

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and failed to wake up when supposed to. All those witnessing were embarrassed by the turn of events. Finally, Vicar General Ponceau brought the show to a halt, admitting that there was no point in trying further as it had become clear that the girl was incapable of discerning between the blessed and the nonblessed.38 Schwann, who had been invited with the promise of secrecy, agreed to remain silent on his own conclusions about the incident. Between 1869 and 1874, however, the Catholic press would, at times, allude to the eminent scientists supposed conviction that Lateaus stigmata were genuine. In their biographies of the girl, both Van Looy and Rohling described Schwanns visit to Bois-dHaine and insisted on the success of the experiment.39 Perhaps it was Schwanns loyalty to the church that made him keep silent on the matter for many years. In any case, in 1874, at the request of the eminent physiologist Rudolf Virchow, he nally expressed his opinion on the phenomena he had witnessed in Bois-dHaine years before. Alongside a paper on the subject, Virchow published a letter he had received from Schwann stating that his visit to Bois-dHaine had in no way convinced him of the supernatural character of the phenomena.40 Other Catholic physicians came to witness the Belgian stigmatic. Antoine Imbert-Gourbeyre, a professor at the medical school of Clermond-Ferrand, France, wrote a famous medical study on stigmatization after a visit to Bois-dHaine. Imbert-Gourbeyre, struck by Lateaus stigmata, had begun to study the phenomena in an attempt to defend stigmata and miracles on a scientic basis, and in 1873 he produced his rst work on the subject, Les stigmatises. The book, which was a complete success in France, comprised two volumes dealing with Lateau and the Italian stigmatic Palma Matarelli, a much more spectacular gure in mystical circles and a controversial stigmatic for the church. The Vatican never publicly denounced the book, but Imbert-Gourbeyre was privately asked not to circulate it further; despite its popular success, Les stigmatises was never reprinted.41 Over the next twenty-ve years, Imbert-Gourbeyre produced two more volumes on stigmata. In 1894, he wrote La stigmatisation, which became a classic work in the history of stigmatiza38. On Schwanns faith, see Florkin, Lettres de Thodore Schwann (above, n. 16), pp. 1426; on his involvement with Lateau, see pp. 155160, 166179. 39. Van Looy, Biographie, pp. 141145; Rohling, Louise Lateau, p. 29. 40. Rudolf Virchow, ber Wunder (Breslau: Morgenstern, 1874). Schwanns letter is on pp. 2628. 41. Hilaire Mutton, Catholicisme intransigeant et culture prophtique: Lapport des archives du Saint-Ofce et de lIndex, Revue historique 104 (2001): 123.

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tion (in which Matarelli made a much-reduced appearance); the book, with its hundreds of small entries of historical cases of stigmata, failed to interest the French public. Five years later, he wrote Lhypnotisme et la stigmatisation, in which he attacked hypnotism as a practice dispossessing humans of free will, intelligence, memory, and dignity. Hypnosis, he deplored, made the subject a slave to the will of others. The book was an attack on the Salptrire group, who had been attempting to explain miracles or denying them altogether.42 Like Lefbvre, Imbert-Gourbeyre struggled to reconcile his faith and acceptance of church dogmas with his scientic training, but he was willing to go much further than Lefbvre. If the church declared a phenomenon to be miraculous, Imbert-Gourbeyre argued, scientists had to accept the verdict and renounce authority on these matters. Whereas false cases of stigmata would be explained by science, miracles would not. Lefbvre had refused to give nal authority to the church, though hinting at the possibility of miracles; Schwann had chosen to remain silent; and Imbert-Goubeyre made his position clear: authority and loyalty for a true Catholic scientist rested, rst and foremost, on the Catholic Church.43

III. Debates at the Acadmie Royale de Mdecine De Belgique

In July 1874, Nestor Charbonnier, a physician from Brussels, read his memoir on Lateau at the Acadmie royale de mdecine de Belgique, thereby initiating a sixteen-month discussion among the members of the academy regarding her phenomena. Although Charbonnier had never met Lateau, he felt condent that the stigmata were real, not fraudulent, and the result of a physiological process. He argued that fasting was at the heart of the experience of mystics. The absence of food and drink could provoke extreme reactions: constipation, absence of transpiration, insomnia, and resistance to cold, all typical symptoms in stigmatics, had to be caused by their refusal to absorb food or drink. As for other symptoms frequently mentioned in cases of stigmataodor of sanctity, acuity of smell, cadaverous incorruptibility, and incombustibility, for examplethey had yet to be recorded by serious observers and until they were they should not be taken into account. The stigmata themselves required explanation, of course. For Charbonnier, with prolonged deprivation of food and water, the subjects skin and lungs became the only or42. See the last section on this point. 43. Antoine Imbert-Gourbeyre, Lhypnotisme et la stigmatisation (Paris: Bloud et Barral, 1899), pp. 78, 57; and Antonie Imbert-Gourbeyre, La stigmatisation (Paris: Librairie Catholique, 1894).

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gans providing nutrition for the body, and blood would begin to concentrate there; when this was accompanied by frequent agellation, it could provoke permanent wounds.44 It is in the study of the most simple phenomena of organic chemistry that we must look for the explanation of the most extraordinary physiological phenomena, Charbonnier asserted, arguing for the possibility of survival without subsistence.45 Much was made of the fact that Lateau had refused to eat or sleep since March 1871, and yet persisted in good health.46 The claim was not surprising, however: fasting and sleep deprivation had traditionally been associated with mystical experiences. In this case, the supposed deprivations appeared to have no effect on her strength and physical appearance. For the next ve years, she was able to participate in household activities and continue her work as a seamstress. Starting in 1876, however, she became visibly weaker, though she still reportedly limited her food intake to the daily morning communion, which she insisted was enough to sustain her. For those defending her experiences as genuine in a religious sense, this seemingly inconsequential fast was a miracle in no uncertain terms. For those who hesitated or could not accept the miraculous nature of Lateaus phenomena, like Charbonnier, her refusal to eat and drink became a central point of debate.47
44. Nestor Charbonnier, Maladies et facults diverses des mystiques (Brussels: Manceaux, 1875), pp. 249265, 286. 45. Ibid., p. 109 (emphasis in original). 46. In fact, Lateaus room did not even hold a bed. The furniture consisted in a little table, a few wooden chairs, and a wardrobe. When opened on September 27, 1874, the wardrobe contained dishes, water, half a loaf of white bread, pears, and apples: Warlomont, Rapport de la Commission (above, n. 1), p. 164. 47. Self-starvation is frequently observed in mystics. In the case of Lateau, her apparent incapacity or refusal to eat occurred at a time when anorexia was beginning to attract attention as a pathology in medical circles. Classical articles about anorexia were written independently by Charles Lasgue in France and William Withey Gull in England in 1873. The fasting girls, who claimed not to need food and yet still lived in good health, were also a popular topic of discussion in scientic circles and a source of wonder for the public at the end of the nineteenth century. The question of food consumption and health was thus a matter of public debate. Charbonniers belief that, without food, a living organism would simply obtain energy from the skin and lungs was not uncommon. On the history of self-starvation in its different manifestations, see Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); Jacques Matre, Anorexies religieuses, anorexies mentales (Paris: ditions du Cerf, 2000); Walter Vandereycken and Ron Van Deth, From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls (New York: New York University Press, 1994).

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Rudolf Virchow, for instance, never met Lateau but he gave a presentation about her in September 1874 in Breslau in the same year that Rohling dedicated his biography on Lateau to Virchow. It was in response to this dedication that Virchow decided to make public his opinion on the matter. He paid particular attention to fasting. Unlike Charbonnier, he believed that it was impossible for a person to survive without food. If Lateau had not yet been revealed as a fraud, it was because she had yet to be observed under the strictest of conditions: she had remained in her home, surrounded by family and clergy. Virchow asked for her to be taken to his laboratory for observations; there, he claimed, he would be able to observe her and would probably nd out that her claims about fasting did not hold true.48 A second time, Lateau was asked to move her phenomena to a scientists space; like Schwanns request ve years earlier, however, Virchows was denied by clerical authority in the name of the same dignity and liberty.49 In October 1874, it was Hubert Bonss turn to present his conclusions on the stigmatic in front of the Acadmie royale de mdecine de Belgique. Bons, a physician from Charleroi and one of the founders of the Ligue internationale des antivaccinateurs, gave a presentation that was, in effect, an attack on Lefbvres work. For him, Lateau was sick, the victim of what he called a christomanie affecting the nervous centers and the blood, provoking hallucinations, spasms, and hemophilia. If treated early enough, these afictions could easily be cured; in fact, Bons claimed to have cured many patients with such symptoms in his own practice. In Lateaus case, however, what had probably been isolated occurrences at rst had been cultivated by a group of fanatics and subsequently became weekly phenomena lled with mystical meaning. It was not too late, Bons pleaded: the girl could still be saved if removed from her surroundings. Once again, however, a request to move Lateau to a new space was vehemently denied by the church and her family.50
48. Virchow, Ueber Wunder (above, n. 40). Virchow was a physician and a politician, famous for his work in cellular pathology and in the area of public health. He was also an anticlerical, and a major player in the Kulturkampf. Virchow remained interested in the phenomena of fasting long after the Lateau episode; in 1887, for example, he supervised a Norwegian fasting man and pronounced himself unable to explain the phenomenon (the man later turned out to be a fraud): Vandereycken and Van Deth, From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls (above, n. 47), p. 86. 49. Warlomont, Discussion des travaux suivants (above, n. 9), p. 995. 50. Hubert Bons, Rsum dun mmoire intitul: Louise Lateau, ou lextatique de Bois dHaine, au point de vue mdical et philosophique, par M. le docteur Bons, correspondant Charleroi, Bulletin de lAcadmie royale de mdecine de Belgique, 3rd ser., 8 (1874): 933943.

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Like all memoirs presented at the academy, those of Charbonnier and Bons were reviewed and reported on by a commission of members of the academy, but Bons decided to withdraw his memoir from the proceedings of the academy. Only Charbonniers memoir remained for discussion at the academy the following year. The physician variste Warlomont, an ardent advocate of vaccination in Belgium, was put in charge of the commission, and in February 1875 he presented his report to the academy during two sessions. Although not required to, he had decided to travel to Bois-dHaine on a few occasions to witness Lateaus feats for himself. He had witnessed the stigmata and remained extremely skeptical. His report contained a detailed presentation of his impressions of the girl and her surroundings, as well as his medical examination. On the question of abstinence, Warlomont was formal: Lateau had remained active, every Friday she lost a certain quantity of blood, she expired water vapor and carbonic acid, and her weight had not varied since she had been under observation; if she was burning carbon, she had somehow to obtain it: she ate. When? How? Warlomont considered the hypothesis of somnambulism. What did Lateau do all night long if she did not sleep? Even she admitted to absences of mind during this period. Could it be that during those moments, she would eat and sleep? Warlomont had reservations regarding many of Lefbvres claims, but he wanted to keep an open mind rather than explain away everything as Charbonnier and Bons had. Not satised with Lefbvres experiments on Lateau, Warlomont performed his own. On Thursday, January 21, 1875, he xed a new device on Lateaus right hand, preventing any contact with her skin while allowing observers to verify the progression of the stigma through a glass. Satised with his device, he came the next day with Jean Crocq, another member of the academy, to observe Lateaus hand. The two physicians found the right one bleeding a little under the glass. Although they failed to observe the bleeding stigmata in the clear way that Lefbvre had described, this was enough to convince them of the spontaneous nature of the hemorrhages. The marks that Lefbvre had claimed were not visible by the next morning, however, were still there when Warlomont came to visitin fact, traces of the hand-stigmata remained throughout the week. It seems that very little would make them bleed again, he commented. The commission also accepted the reality of the ecstasies, impossible to fake with all the functional troubles that accompanied them. Both the stigmata and the ecstasies, however, were attributed to physiological causes. In his report, Warlomont talked of the inuence of the nervous system, of imagination, and of the concentration of thoughts on body tissues in his at-

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tempt to explain what he had witnessed. As in the cases of convulsions, epilepsies, and other classical neuroses of an extraordinary kind, the nvropathie stigmatique was characterized by the capacity in the subject to leave her physiological condition for a moment and enter a second condition in which her brain no longer perceived external stimuli or no longer interpreted them in a familiar way.51 This was not the rst time that the role of imagination was brought up in discussions about stigmata. The rst attempt to give the phenomena a rational explanation was made by Alfred Maury, future professor of history and morals at the Collge de France and a member of the Acadmie des inscriptions et des belles lettres.52 Most of Maurys work dealt with legends and myths, with a particular focus on the supernatural. In 1860, in La magie et lastrologie, he discussed the case of Francis of Assisi and other stigmatics. The obsession of mystics with the crucixion of their savior, coupled with the disability imposed on their bodies by prolonged fasts, could sometimes produce strong physical reactions, he argued. For Maury, stigmata, ecstasies, and other extreme signs of religiosity were clear examples of a mental disease developed by meditation, obsessive thoughts on certain supernatural facts, and the restrictions and suffering imposed on the body. It was also not impossible that obsession could lead to unconscious fraud, he added. Maury called for increased attention to the power of imagination to inuence physiological functions, which was stronger in more susceptible and nervous persons and thus stronger in women. Ecstatic mysticism, he wrote, consists in a long series of moral and physical hallucinations that lead, in the most delicate and most excitable organisms, to stigmatization and later to death.53 Nine years later, in December 1869, Joseph Delboeuf, a professor at the Universit de Lige and a member of the scientic branch of the Acadmie royale de Belgique, wrote in the Journal de Lige an article on Lateau herself. Delboeuf was reacting to the rst three in51. Warlomont, Rapport de la Commission (above, n. 1), pp. 165, 174180, 214218, 260, 314315. 52. From 1868 to 1888, he would also hold the position of director at the Archives de France. 53. Alfred Maury, La magie et lastrologie dans lantiquit et au moyen-ge, ou tude sur les superstitions paennes qui se sont perptues jusqu nos jours (Paris: Didier, 1860), p. 413; Maurys discussion of stigmatics, and of mystics more generally, is found on pp. 339414. On Maury and the relationship between his writings on hallucinations, dreams, and the supernatural and his political positions, see Ian Dowbiggin, Alfred Maury and the Politics of the Unconscious in Nineteenth-Century France, History of Psychiatry 1 (1990): 255287.

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stallments of Lefbvres work on the Belgian stigmatic. Not doubting the reality of the phenomena as presented by his colleague, Delboeuf nonetheless felt that the articles showed a lack of scientic rigor brought on by religious belief. He presented Lateau as the victim of a zealous and sick imagination that had been fed since her childhood with mystical ideas. That, in certain morbid cases, a sensation could bring an organic modication, was a possibility not to be neglected. In his article, Delboeuf called for a more rigorous study of the girl: what had she been doing and thinking in the last few weeks before the appearance of the stigmata? It had been Lent. Had she been fasting? Had she been praying in front of the images of the Passion? None of this information had been sought after, either by Lefbvre or by the ecclesiastic authorities who had observed Lateau. Like Maury years earlier, Delboeuf called for a study of the inuence of the moral on the physical.54 At the academy, discussion on Lateau continued. In May 1875, they heard the opinion of Gottlieb Gluge, holder of the chairs of pathological anatomy and experimental pathology at the Universit de Bruxelles. Gluges presentation was a virulent attack against the scientists who had observed Lateau. The scientic method had yet to be applied in this case, he deplored. The stigmata, ecstasies, and abstinence consisted of a little disease and a lot of fraud, and he pleaded with the members of the academy to close the door to superstition and fanaticism.55 His report was followed by a discussion involving many at the academy, including Lefbvre and Warlomont. Other works and other stigmatics were discussed in the June and July sessions. Finally, on October 9, 1875, the last reports were heard. After a long debate during which, again, Lefbvre attempted to convince his colleagues of the authenticity of the phenomena, it was decided that the phenomena had been sufciently observed and discussed: they were physiological in nature, and those that had yet to be conrmed should no longer preoccupy the academy.56 Bons would later write:
54. Joseph Delboeuf, Le sommeil et les rves. Le magntisme animal. Quelques considrations sur la psychologie de lhypnotisme (Paris: Fayard, 1993), pp. 387401. On Delboeuf and his contributions to psychiatry and, more precisely, his work on hypnotism, see Andr Leblanc, On Hypnosis, Simulation, and Faith: Post-Hypnotic Suggestion in France, 18841896 (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 2000); idem, Thirteen Days: Joseph Delboeuf versus Pierre Janet on the Nature of Hynotic Suggestions, Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences 40 (2004): 123147; Serge Nicolas, Lcole de la Salptrire en 1885, Psychologie et histoire 1 (2000): 165207. 55. M. Gluge, Quelques mots sur le cas de Louise Lateau, la stigmatise de BoisdHaine, Bulletin de lAcadmie royale de mdecine 9 (1875): 593596. 56. Warlomont, Discussion des travaux suivants (above, n. 9), p. 999.

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I hope that this will be the last word of a science compromised and of a truth offended by the most stupid and the most insufferable mystication that fanaticism has ever inspired.57 After months of debate, the academy abandoned the matter without a consensus and without any clear conclusion on the question of abstinence.58 After 1875, scientic interest in Lateau receded. The Acadmie royale de mdecine de Belgique had closed their discussion on the stigmatic. It is difcult to nd information about what happened to Lateau between 1876 and her death in 1883. The fourth edition of Van Looys biography does discuss her life up to 1879, but this is one of the few items available from that period.59 In 1876, she became increasingly weak. From 1879 to 1883, she remained bedridden. When she died in August 1883, though she was no longer discussed at the Belgian academy, she was still an important gure in the Catholic world. As far away as Indiana, the Catholic newspaper the Ave Maria reported: Several of our foreign exchanges announce the death of Louise Lateau, whose wonderful history is known to Catholics the world over. She was the living evidence of the Cross and Passion to an unbelieving generation.60

IV. The Girl Is a Hysteric

Though there was very little discussion of Lateau by scientists during the last few years of her life, she was the subject of renewed sci57. Hubert Bons, Fin de la comdie de Bois-dHaine (Brussels: Manceaux, 1876), p. 1 (emphasis in original). 58. For a contemporary treatment of the discussions on Louise Lateau at the Acadmie royale de mdecine de Belgique, see Anonymous, Louise Lateau before the Belgian Royal Academy of Medicine, Catholic World 22 (March 1876): 823832. More recently, see Roger Darquenne, LAcadmie de mdecine pige par le cas Louise Lateau, Haynau: Revue dhistoire religieuse du comt et de la province de Hainaut 3 ( June 1992): 4357; Philippe Martin, Louise Lateau lintersection de deux univers: Mdecine et spiritualit au dernier sicle, ibid., pp. 2332. On the history of the academy, see Louis Gallez and Lon Gallez, Histoire de lAcadmie royale de mdecine de Belgique (18411902), 2 vols. (Brussels: Hayez, 1904). Bons and Warlomont are discussed regarding their positions on vaccination in Roger Darquenne, Les batailles pour la sant dans le Centre (18001950) (Haine Saint-Pierre: Cercle dhistoire et de folklore Henri GuilleminLa Louvire, 1988), pp. 36, 123. 59. Van Looy reproduced a few letters he received from different ecclesiastic authorities still in contact with Lateau and some articles dealing with her between 1874 and 1879: Van Looy, Biographie, pp. 213257. 60. Ave Maria: A Journal Devoted to the Honor of the Blessed Virgin, Notre Dame, Indiana 19 (September 22, 1883): 756757. Americans were familiar with Lateau not only through the translation of Rohlings work in 1876 but also through a book by Frances Howe, a resident of Indiana who visited Lateau while traveling across Europe and later

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entic interest starting in the 1890s. Her stigmata had rst appeared in 1868, two years before Jean-Martin Charcot began his work on hysteria, before the study of hypnosis and suggestion seriously entered the hospitals and universities, and at a time when scientic work on religious attitudes was still infrequent. Fifteen years later, however, when Lateau died, the intrusion of the medical sciences into the religious sphere had become more noticeable and more ofcial. That year, the Bureau of Medical Consultations at the Lourdes sanctuary was opened. Nine years after Lateaus death, in 1892, Charcot published La foi qui gurit, the famous article in which he suggested the concept of faith-healing to explain the miraculous recoveries witnessed at Lourdes: such recoveries could occur in particular cases, he argued, when the disease was of hysterical origin, and when subjects were of a particularly suggestible type.61 In the last years of the nineteenth century, Pierre Janet began publishing on possession, ecstasy, and stigmata, using his previous work on the disaggregation of the personality to understand these religious phenomena in physiological terms.
wrote a book about her encounter with the Belgian stigmatic: Frances R. Howes, A Visit to Bois dHaine (Baltimore: Kelly, Piet, 1878). Interest in Lateau continues to this day, particularly in Belgium and in her village. A Christian group, Les Amis de Louise Lateau, has renovated her house and furnished it with her belongings; the site is now open to the public. The remains of Lateau can also be visited behind the Bois-dHaine church. The bishop of Tournay introduced a request for Lateaus canonization at the end of the nineteenth century; at the time, Pope Leo XIII, who had a very favorable opinion of Lateau, decided not to pronounce himself on the matter. Lateau was the great cause of Msgr. Dumont, who had refused to follow Leo XIIIs more liberal attitudes in politics and was dismissed from his functions in 1879. Even if Lateau closed her door to Dumont after his quarrels with the pope, her name remained associated with his. The matter remained buried until 1991 when Les Amis de Louise Lateau began to gather various documents in a request to reopen the case. In 1994, these documents were presented to the Vatican: Un entretien de spcialistes sur Louise Lateau, Haynau: Revue dhistoire religieuse du comt et de la province de Hainaut 3 ( June 1992): 3342. 61. Charcot even mentions Lateau briey in this article, as an example of subjects in whom persisting ulcerations occurred in neurosis: Jean-Martin Charcot, La foi qui gurit, Revue hebdomadaire (December 3, 1892): 127. On the history of this important article, see Jacqueline Lalouette, Charcot au coeur des problmes religieux de son temps, Revue neurologique 150 (1994): 511516. On Janets work on the topic, see Pierre Janet, De langoisse lextase: tudes sur les croyances et les sentiments, 2 vols. (Paris: Alcan, 19261928); idem, Les tats de consolation et les extases, Journal de psychologie (May 1925): 369420; idem, La psychologie de la croyance et le mysticisme, Revue de mtaphysique et de morale 43 (1936): 327358, 507532; 44 (1937): 369410; idem, Les sentiments de joie dans lextase, Journal de psychologie ( June 1925): 465499; idem, Un cas de possession et lexorcisme moderne, Bulletin de lUniversit de Lyon 2 (1895): 4157; idem, Une extatique: Confrence faite lInstitut psychologique international le 25 mai 1901, Bulletin de lInstitut psychologique international 1 (1901): 209240.

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Already in 1875, however, Lateau had begun to attract interest in Parisian scientic circles. Dsir-Magloire Bourneville, a disciple of Charcot, was the rst to discuss the case in detail, in a book published that year. Bournevilles interest in the Belgian stigmatic comes as no surprise. His anticlerical stance remained constant throughout his career. From his political defense of cremation and the laicization of nursing to his interest in mysticism, he argued that religious beliefs had become ghosts of the past. The time had come to reinterpret these occurrences. Looking at both contemporary and past instances of mysticism, possession, stigmata, and ecstasies, he encouraged a new understanding of such phenomena in pathological terms. In 1883, he began publishing La bibliothque diabolique, a series in which classics of the witchcraft and demonic traditions were republished and new contributions to the pathologization of mystical phenomena were presented.62 A similar interest brought Bourneville to consider Lateau in the 1870s. Having never met her, he based his account on the works of Lefbvre and Imbert-Gourbeyre. He attempted to provide a clinical demonstration of the fact that Lateau was a hysteric, comparable to some of the patients he encountered at the Salptrire. Her symptomsdemonic attacks, hemorrhages, ecstasies, contractions experienced as crucixion, abstinence, absence of feces, considerable reduction of urine, and insomniaeven if they were to be conrmed by other observers, were symptoms that, taken one by one, all existed in the clinical history of hysteria. Ignorance and fanaticism had allowed this severe disease to develop in Lateau, Bourneville argued; not unlike cases of demonic possession in the past, her stigmata were physiological phenomena that, outside the connes of modern science, had been given a deplorable importance.63
62. For a discussion of Bournevilles anticlericalism, see Bernard Brais, Dsir Magloire Bourneville and French Anticlericalism during the Third Republic, in Doctors, Politics and Society: Historical Essays, ed. Roy Porter and Dorothy Porter (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993), pp. 107139; Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 362372. On the Bibliothque diabolique and retrospective medicine, see Jean-Martin Charcot and Paul Richer, Les dmoniaques dans lart, presented by Pierre Fdida and Georges DidiHuberman (Paris: Macula, 1984); Sarah Ferber, Charcots Demons: Retrospective Medicine and Historical Diagnosis in the Writings of the Salptrire School, in Illness and Healing Alternatives in Western Europe, ed. Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Hilary Marland, and Hans de Waardt (London/New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 120140. 63. Dsir-Magloire Bourneville, Science et miracle: Louise Lateau ou la stigmatise belge (Paris: Delahaye, 1875), pp. 6162. Matre discusses Bournevilles treatment of Lateau in Jacques Matre, De Bourneville nos jours: Interprtations psychiatriques de la mystique, volution psychiatrique 64 (1999): 765778.

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The stories of mystics ll the pages of scientic journals of the n de sicle. Living in hospital wards or surrounded by devout followers, portrayed as hysterics or saints, as manipulated or manipulators, these men and (more often) these women played a signicant role in the development of theories of pathological behavior. Though historians have acknowledged this role, it remains little explored. The relationship between the religious and the pathological was clear to contemporary scientists, however. It went beyond the need for psychiatrists and physicians to expand their territory of expertise onto the religious sphere, to acquire authority over faith through its physical phenomenabeyond the development of a language of symptoms, a classication, and a pathology of the religious. For some psychiatrists, it could be the starting point of a reection on human nature in some of its extreme states of mental disorder.64 With the rise of psychology and psychiatry, the subjects were made to leave their homes or sanctuaries for the more sterile and controlled hospital ward. In his 1926 work De langoisse lextase, Pierre Janet discussed the case of Madeleine, a stigmatic he had been following for thirty years. Many similarities could be found between the phenomena experienced by Lateau and by Madeleine, but a world of differences subsisted in the locations, explanations, and construction of identity. Madeleines confessor and her sister both thought she was a saint; but in the hospital ward, her virtuous character had no chance to be considered seriously. Janet diagnosed her as having suffered from a neurosis since her childhood that had de64. A good starting point when considering the role of religion in the development of pathology is Mark Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), in which he reviews the various understandings of hysteria throughout the ages, allocating some twenty-ve pages to the late-nineteenthcentury relationships between religion and hysteria. Micale calls for a greater concern for this topic by historians. The study has been taken up in the case of Lourdes, in which the presence of a medical discourse in the story from the start has been emphasized: Harris, Lourdes (above, n. 2); Kaufman, Miracles (above, n. 2); Szabo, Seeing Is Believing? (above, n. 20). Historians of psychiatry have also shown some interest in the role played by religious faith in the development of the discipline. Le Malfan has discussed the ways in which spiritism entered the pathological realm: Pascal Le Malfan, Les dlires spirites: Histoire du discours psychopathologique sur la pratique du spiritisme, ses abords et ses avatars (18501950) (Paris: LHarmattan, 1999). Jan Goldstein has argued that the rise of the diagnostic of hysteria in France was associated with the establishment of a republican and anticlerical government at the end of the 1870s. For Goldstein, the expansionist movement in psychiatry was an anticlerical one in which psychiatrists were attempting to impose their authority over the church on the phenomena associated with faith: Jan Goldstein, The Hysteria Diagnosis and the Politics of Anticlericalism in Late Nineteenth-Century France, Journal of Modern History 54 (1982): 209239; idem, Console and Classify (above, n. 62).

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veloped into a severe religious delirium with ecstatic crises. There is thus a geographical dimension to the experience of a stigmatic: in the hospital, all phenomena became symptoms, and Madeleines love for God was turned into a pathology.65 Already in 1907, Georges Dumas had written a classic review of stigmatization in which he proclaimed stigmata to have been explained. No longer could psychologists follow mystics in the symbolic and religious signication they gave to the phenomena, he concluded, as if announcing a period of hesitation to be over.66 But what had really been explained? Was the move to include the phenomenon under the great mantle of hysteria sufcient? Did naming a phenomenon explain it? If the hesitation was over, it was on one aspect: by the beginning of the twentieth century, no one doubted the possible appearance of stigmata. Although they did not deny the possibility of fraud, Dumas, Janet, Bourneville, and Charcot did not deny the power of the mind to produce such phenomena. Unlike Lefbvre with Lateau in 1873, Janet never even considered the possibility of fraud in the case of Madeleine. Of course, Lateau had remained in her home, while Madeleine was in the wardbut, still, this does mark a new turn in the story. Stigmata were possible, and were brought on by naturalistic causes. Like patients in the wards, mystics had become hysterics: their phenomena were symptoms, and their messages, ramblings. Over the years, psychiatric interest in the physiological phenomena of religious faith diminished. For the community of medical professionals, they had been sufciently discussed. Stigmatics were now understood, included in the corpus of the discipline, classied. Upon closer inspection, however, it seems more accurate to say that, like physicians years earlier, those who at the turn of the century became interested in the phenomena were unable to account for them, left them undened; that explaining had been necessary in order to claim expertise, but that, once established, authority no longer needed to be exercised over what remained problematic for the discipline; that the abandonment of the problems associated with mystics had more to do with an apparent solution than with a more profound one. In fact, how much more satisfying were
65. Janet, De langoisse lextase (above, n. 61); idem, Une extatique (above, n. 61). For a discussion of Madeleine, her life, and her relationship to Janet, see Jacques Matre, Une inconnue clbre: La Madeleine Lebouc de Janet (Paris: Anthropos, 1993). Matre provides a historical and psychoanalytic perspective to the relationship. 66. Georges Dumas, La stigmatisation chez les mystiques chrtiens, Revue des deux mondes 39 (1907): 227.

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Bourneville and Janets explanations than Bonss christomanie or Warlomonts nvropathie stigmatique? In the end, Lateaus story is not, as we might expect, a story about the competing authorities of science and religion and about ultimate victory for science. For one thing, we can hardly speak of an intrusion of the medical establishment into the religious sphere: ecclesiastic authorities actively pursued the participation of physicians from the beginning, and Lateau, who obeyed the church, complied to an extent with the demands of the scientists who visited her. Perhaps the church did not have any other choice but to accept to presence of scientists in its territory, but still, it welcomed them. More importantly, perhaps, there was no triumph, no victor in the story. Yes, names for diseases were suggested, but what did it amount to? Of course, more observations and experiments could have been performed. Delboeufs questions, for example, could have been answered. Further attempts to bring Lateau into a laboratory could have been made. But would that have made a difference? What if no proof of fraud could be found? What type of evidence would have convinced a strong believer that this was not the work of God? Respectively, what could have convinced an atheist that this was the work of God? Would Schwanns testing of Lateaus ability to recognize a member of the church and wake up satisfy most scientists, or were these not phenomena that would remain beyond the reaches of science? In the nal analysis, Lateau, her stigmata and her ecstasy, remained mysterious, uncomfortable, and perhaps even dangerous in the face of both religious and scientic scrutiny.

Acknowledgments
Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 2002 History of Science Society annual meeting, and in the colloquium of Department III of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in February 2003. I would like to thank all those who provided comments and assistance in the writing of this article, particularly Charlotte Bigg, Elizabeth Hayes, Andr Leblanc, Alexandre Mtraux, Stefan Petri, and two anonymous referees.