“Stigmata Science: Naturalizing Supernatural Wounds.” Guest Post by Kristof Smeyers

Kristof Smeyers is a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century religion and folklore, currently focusing on so-called supernatural phenomena within European Christianity. He is writing a PhD on stigmata in Britain and Ireland as member of the Religious Bodies research team at the University of Antwerp. He previously worked as a research assistant in the Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe project at University College London, and in archives and research libraries in Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK.

In 1898 the British Medical Journal wrote that stigmata, the wounds inflicted on Christ’s body during his crucifixion as they appear on mortal, living bodies, “have entered the realm of natural sciences, no longer solely examined as ou superchérie ou miracle”. Not only had medical scientists across Europe more or less conclusively diagnosed the Wounds of Christ on people’s bodies as the neurotic purpura of “religious fanatics […] in a state of extreme hysterical ecstasy”. They also managed to induce these bleeding wounds on bodies under hypnosis in laboratory conditions, such as the “pious neurotic” Elizabeth K. in Weimar Germany, who allegedly developed stigmata after watching a film on Good Friday 1932 which “showed a scene of the crucifixion of Jesus in realistic detail”.

Maria Domenica Lazzeri, world-renowned stigmatic ‘pur sang’ from the region Tyrol in the 1840s. Author’s private collection

Claims of divine intervention on especially pious bodies were thus, according to the BMJ, definitively debunked. Stigmatics were prodded and poked, in the famous Parisian hospital Salpetrière and in the village doctor’s practice, often in the public eye and in the presence of sensation-hungry journalists.

A brief excursion into the Stigmatics database of the University of Antwerp, for example, shows how more than a hundred of the listed individuals were examined and diagnosed by medical practitioners. The purpose of such examinations varied between national contexts. Jan Goldstein, for example, has shown how in fin-de-siècle France the focus on the pathological nature of Catholic miracle phenomena was politicised to “the effect of debunking religion” in a laicising, anti-clerical France. Similarly, Tine Van Osselaer has described how the wounds of the world-famous Belgian Louise Lateau became political currency in the late nineteenth-century culture wars of Belgium and Germany.

My research on possible causes of controversies over stigmata in Britain and Ireland also hones in on scientific and medical discussions about the phenomenon, which remained extremely rare in the Isles.

For the period between 1800 and 1940, I have found sixteen individuals who bore the stigmata on their bodies. They were a very diverse group, many of them not adhering to the stereotypical continental “stigmatic”, who was often a piously Catholic, illiterate woman for whom sharing in Christ’s Passion was the culmination of a young life tainted by worldly illness and suffering.

In Britain and Ireland, the wounds appeared on the bodies of an outcast Methodist, Presbyterian evangelicals, an Anglican Benedict nun, and even a self-declared non-believer. Among them, stigmata appear not exclusively as the Five Wounds of Christ but as a wide range of skin markings, from elaborate Christian iconography – roses, crosses, lilies – to crudely etched words in red ink or chicken blood, and bleeding gashes in different sizes and shapes.

Anglican faith healer Dorothy Kerin (1889-1963) laying her stigmatized hands on faithful followers. Still from Healing 1962, © British Pathé.

The science of stigmata is further complicated by overlapping uses of the word “stigmata” in English – even when we ignore its popularity in sociological writings from the mid nineteenth century.

By the early twentieth century, the term’s pathological definition lifted the phenomenon out of its religious frame of reference and placed it, for example, within a set of unusual dermatological afflictions, from curiously shaped rashes and blotches to haematidrosis, or “bloody sweat”. They often implied an underlying, psychosomatic cause. Physicians read stigmatised skin for signs of what caused problems underneath, physical as well as physiological and emotional: its condition, according to the physician James Johnson, was “always indicative of the condition of the individual”.

In 1946, for example, the British psychiatrist Robert Moody described the case of an army officer whom he treated for stress disorder and sleepwalking. In his sleepwalking episodes, Moody wrote, marks or imprints appeared on the officer’s skin that “resembled the ropes with which he had been tied up” during the war. Those marks bled periodically; Moody called them “stigmata”. Burgeoning sciences of the body and the mind joined hands in attempts to explain the “supernatural” wounds.

One sense that emerges from medical writings – whether dermatological or psychological; whether describing contemporary cases or retroactively diagnosing stigmatized saints like St. Francis of Assisi – is that ironic dismissiveness, or a priori judgments of the phenomenon as “pious fraud”, was often absent.

Scientific communities in fact often looked down on verdicts of fraud as poor science: as “an easy escape from scientific difficulties”. By 1916, newspapers such as the Church of Ireland Gazette noted that it was “strange to find belief in the stigmata – that is in their reality – more widespread among scientists [than among clergymen and the wider public]”, who “consider their existence an open question”. Indeed, rather than being attempts to debunk, self-consciously scientific inquiries often aimed to reveal the “natural causes” of “supernatural seemings”.

Not everybody agreed, of course. Open-minded efforts to extend the boundaries of the realm of natural science to include the miraculous wounds could enshrine the phenomenon with a respectability it did, in the eyes of devout sceptics, not deserve. Worse: scientific inquiries into stigmata could derail into unhealthy fascination, even belief. In 1882 the Pall Mall Gazette warned stigmata scientists who took “the first step by ‘inquiring’”. They endangered “scientific attitude”, and if they did not abstain from “dangerous” experiments risked sinking “to the very bottom of the pond before they finish”. The bottom of the pond: where some scientists were feared to immerse themselves in their objects of study, only to emerge as believers.

Inevitably in this final stage of editing my PhD, some cases of “stigmata” ended on the cutting floor. For example, British investigators and journalists alike used the term to describe some of the phenomena that marked the body of Eleonore Zugun, a young girl from Romania who interpreted the bitemarks and other lesions that suddenly appeared on her skin not as the calling card of the divine but an evil entity she called “Dracu”.

Eleonore Zugun with scratch- and bite-marks. From Price (1927).

In January 1926 Zugun left her village in the company of Zoe Wassilko-Serecki, a countess well-known in Austrian spiritualist, psychical, and psychoanalyst circles. They toured scientific laboratories and audiences from Vienna to London. Zugun’s poltergeist phenomena were studied by parapsychologists, psychoanalysts and scientific laypeople; “orthodox” and experimental scientific methods met around the thirteen-year-old. These investigations were in turn reported, extensively and sensationally, by British journalists impatient to debunk the whole affair as a peasant girl’s fancies, or as the machinations of an ambitiously masochistic countess.

Zugun appeared on my radar because “stigmata” was how Harry Price at the in the National Laboratory of Psychical Research in London and visitors such as Thea Hyslop, the director of the psychiatric hospital of Bethlehem, wrote about the bite- and scratch-marks made on Zugun’s skin, purportedly by her demon even if none of her examiners including Wassilko herself seriously considered the reality of Dracu’s existence.

Even so, the phenomena were invariably called “brilliant” or “excellent”. Published lab studies compared Zugun’s unusual diabolical marks with the conventional divine stigmata of famous Continentals such as the thirteenth-century St. Francis and the nineteenth-century Belgian peasant, Louise Lateau.

The Zugun controversy among psychical and psychological researchers illustrates how, by the early twentieth century, the pathologization of “stigmata” had transformed into a term for a loose amalgam of corporeal phenomena, which maintained an implicit connotation with some sort of supernatural intervention even when scientists situated their causes squarely within the realm of natural law.

Sources and Further Readings

Allchin, W. H. (Ed.), “Diseases of the blood.” In A Manual of Medicine (vol. 2, pp. 310-311). London, 1900.

British Medical Journal, 10 September 1898, on the stigmata and medical examination of Miss B.’s hyperhidrosis (a patch of skin sweating continuously). Quoted in Frederic W. H. Myers, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Beath (vol. 1, p. 188), London, 1903.

Church of Ireland Gazette, 8 October 1916.

Goldstein, Jan. “The hysteria diagnosis and the politics of anticlericalism in late nineteenth-century France”. Journal of Modern History, 54 (1982), 209-239.

Johnson, James. A Treatise on Derangements of the Liver, Internal Organs, and Nervous System. Concord, 1847.

“Marked girl”, Westminster Gazette, 7 October 1926.

Maudsley, Henry. Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings. London, 1886.

Pall Mall Gazette, 21 October 1882.

Price, Harry. “A report on the telekinetic and other phenomena witnessed through Eleonore Zügun [sic]”. Proceedings of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, 1 (1927), 1-63.

Price, Harry. “Poltergeists that bite”, in Poltergeist over England: Three Centuries of Mischievous Ghosts (chapter 23). London, 1945.

Tuke, Daniel. Illustrations of the Influence of the Mind upon the Body in Health and Disease. London, 1872.

Van Osselaer, Tine, et al, The Devotion and Promotion of Stigmatics in Europe: Between Saints and Celebrities. Leiden, 2020 [Open Access PDF].

Van Osselaer, Tine. “Stigmata, prophecies and politics. Louise Lateau in the German and Belgian culture wars of the late nineteenth century.” Journal of Religious History, 42 (2018), 591–610.

Wolffram, Heather. “‘Trick’, ‘Manipulation’, ‘Farce’: Albert Moll’s Critique of Occultism.” Medical History 56 (2012), 277-295.

© 2021 Kristof Smeyers

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1 thought on ““Stigmata Science: Naturalizing Supernatural Wounds.” Guest Post by Kristof Smeyers”

  1. The dermal phenomena of Eleonoe Zugun fall into a totally different category than the stigmata of Louise Lateau, Therese Neumann, or Padre Pio. These are—leaving religious interpretations aside—psychosomatic in origin whereas the Zugun phenomena are psychokinetic (although focussed on her own body). They arise from outside yet driven by the girl’s superstitious belief in the ‘Dracu’ (i.e. devil). Evidence for that outer origin was provided by experiments where the forearms have ben covered by a thick layer of heavy make-up; the paranormal scratches occurred that way that the integerity of the surface of that make-up was infringed and both the make-up and the skin under showed corresponding scratch marks.
    Peter Mulacz

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