A Remarkable Case from Lourdes

The one very singular healing reported from Lourdes is that of a 22-year-old Italian named Vittorio Micheli. Extensive documentation of his apparently miraculous recovery is found in a book by Patrick Marnham, Lourdes: A Modern Pilgrimage, published in 1981. Briefly, Micheli entered a military hospital on April 16, 1962, suffering from a large mass on his buttock that immobilized him. He had been in pain for a month. His left leg appeared shortened, and his general condition was bad. Doctors prescribed the drug ACTH and vitamins B-1 and B-12. He was X-rayed on May 22, and the results suggested a malignant tumor. He continued to worsen. A week later, a biopsy was carried out, and a sarcoma type of tumor was diagnosed. The patient’s condition grew worse. On July 18, another X-ray revealed that severe deterioration of the hip area had occurred. The bone structure there had virtually disappeared, eaten away by cancer. X-ray photographs reproduced in several magazine articles indicate the absence of parts of the pelvis, the iliac (hip) bone, and the muscle surrounding it. Reports clearly state that Micheli received no medical treatment, such as chemical or radiation therapy. Further X-rays revealed even worse damage to the bone structure, and on August 1 he was transferred to another hospital for cobalt (radiation) treatment. Apparently he never received it. All this time the patient was immobilized in a plaster cast. On May 24, 1963, Micheli decided to visit Lourdes as a last resort; his condition was worsening rapidly. He bathed in the water, and immediately experienced the usual sensations reported by those who claim such healings. He felt a sudden warmth and a ravenous appetite and said he felt that he was healed. Within a month of his return, it was reported that he felt much better, his pain had subsided, and his cast was removed some time after. Summing up, the Lourdes medical bureau said:A remarkable reconstruction of the iliac bone and cotyloid cavity has taken place. The stereotypes [X-rays] made in 1964, 1965, 1968, 1969 confirm categorically and without doubt that an unforeseen and even overwhelming bone reconstruction has taken place of a type unknown in the annals of world medicine. We ourselves ... have never encountered a single spontaneous bone reconstruction of such a nature.

The limb that had once been essentially useless to Micheli now functions, 24 years after his first visit to Lourdes, though he walks with a pronounced limp due to a severely shortened leg. He wears a special shoe to accommodate that defect. On May 26, 1976, the case of Vittorio Micheli was officially recognized as miracle No. 63 at the shrine of Lourdes.

The Search for Evidence on Micheli

The complete medical dossier on the Vittorio Micheli case has been published. A few contrary opinions appeared there, including opinions that Micheli’s original diagnoses had been made without adequate data, and that he had actually received at least some orthodox medical therapy (chemical) during his hospitalization. In order to submit all available evidence to my medical colleagues, I needed good copies of the X-ray photographs. I contacted the religious magazine that had published the X-rays. It had ceased publication. I wrote Lourdes and several friends in France, asking for a source from which I might obtain the photographs. I was not successful. Finally, I submitted all available material—including poor photocopies of the radiographs—to my colleague Dr. Gary Posner for examination and evaluation. Posner agreed to discuss this data with another physician who specializes in such diagnoses. It developed that there were major irregularities in the accounts of Micheli’s treatment. First, it is “inconceivable,” in Posner’s opinion, that this patient had to wait 36 days before an X-ray was taken. The prescribed vitamins could certainly not have been of benefit to his condition, and a mass of the nature described would be immediately suspected of being cancerous. Furthermore, it was 43 days before the hospital performed a biopsy! There are hints in the medical reports that drugs and radiation may have been administered. One very effective medication, in particular, is mentioned. Various writers have described this case, and one statement stands out. It is said that just before Vittorio Micheli went to Lourdes he was “given only a few days to live.” When he was taken for the cobalt treatment, accounts say that then, too, he was told he had only a few days left. This estimate shows up twice in the medical reports, and is obviously wrong both times. Micheli lived on in the military hospital in great discomfort for another ten months before he went to Lourdes. It is difficult to accept the physicians’ testimony that in those ten months he received no medical treatment of any kind other than pain killers, tranquilizers, and vitamins. What equally puzzles my medically informed colleagues is the bizarre treatment that Micheli received initially. An X-ray examination and a biopsy should have been done within a day or two after the patient entered the hospital. Did a miracle take place? We have the living patient available to us for examination. Prominent French medical journals have carried convincing accounts of the case that offer strong support of the “inexplicable” aspects of the evidence. Malignant primary bone tumors make up only .5 percent of all malignancies; therefore, spontaneous remissions of these tumors must be extremely rare. However, there are about a dozen recorded cases of just such remissions, and Micheli’s appears to be one of them. Could it be that some element was present in Micheli’s system that has not been encountered often enough before to have been recorded? That seems unlikely, but it is not impossible. Somewhere, the original X-rays probably exist. The medical board at Lourdes has not responded to requests to see them. Experts I have consulted want very much to consult those X-rays, particularly to determine if Micheli’s hip bone was “completely regenerated” as the reports claim. That would call for not only the bone structure to be replaced, but also the complex ball-and-socket formation with its lubricants. If that did take place, it would be the very first time such a regeneration has been recorded, and as a layman I am astonished that this event did not make a major news item, in both the popular and the academic press. But there is a very important aspect to this “regeneration” claim: If such a “complete” regeneration took place, that fact could only have been determined by exploratory surgery. X-rays cannot differentiate between a genuine regeneration and what is known as a “pseudoarthrosis,” in which the bone structure is naturally replaced by a more primitive arrangement that looks similar in an X-ray photo and also allows adequate articulation of the joint. Such a regrowth is not at all unheard of. But the medical records at Lourdes do not record any surgical procedure being done to validate Micheli’s “complete regeneration.” A search of medical literature reveals that similar recoveries have occurred. The following summary description, quoted directly, word-for-word from a medical journal, Acta Orthopaedica Scandinavica (February 1978, 49(1):49-53) sounds almost identical to the Micheli case, except that Lourdes did not enter into it:Spontaneous regression of a malignant primary bone tumour. A histologically confirmed malignant, primary bone tumour in the [left] pelvis, presumably an osteosarcoma, underwent spontaneous regression. The large tumour was inoperable and gave rise to severe pain as well as difficulty in walking. After 2 years of progression, with increasing destruction of the pelvic bones, the clinical and radiological condition improved spontaneously, and at present the patient is alive, almost symptom-free, after 6 years follow-up.

In this case, the patient had almost precisely the same condition as Micheli, so much so that I had to refer to the original report to determine that it was not his case being described. In this case, too, no medical treatment was reported. Both recoveries took place in the same way, with the same end results. But let’s get back to the religious magazine that ran the story of the Micheli case. The caption on the first X-ray reads:X-ray taken in 1963 when Vittorio Micheli ... went to Lourdes, shows complete destruction of the left pelvis hip socket and left thigh bone.

The date marked on that X-ray, used as evidence by the Lourdes team to establish their miracle, is “23.VIII.63.” The X-ray was made three months after Micheli was “cured.” Yet in June 1963, two months before this “complete destruction,” the medical record says that “he could walk ... without crutches, without pain.” Are we asked to believe that he walked without a left hip? We must consider as well that in the early days of the medical bureau at Lourdes, almost 80 cures a year were officially accepted as “inexplicable.” Since 1947, with improved diagnostic tools and a better understanding of medicine, less than one cure a year has been accepted in that category. We now know much more about the remarkable defenses and repair facilities of living organisms. We know, for example, that our bodies are invaded all the time by various malignancies that are never manifested because they are fought off and killed by the body’s natural defense mechanisms. As Ellen Bernstein, editor of the Medical and Health Annual of the Encyclopaedia Bricannica, points out:Miracles ... are conditional; they depend on time, place, what is known, and what is not known. As medical sophistication increases, miracles necessarily decrease, which may mean that the days of “miraculous cures” at Lourdes are numbered.