In 1637, a young Spanish farmer named Miguel Juan Pellicer was run over by a cart. His right leg was crushed. He was taken to the Real Hospital de Gracia in Zaragoza, where surgeons Juan de Estanga and Diego Millaruelo amputated the leg below the knee. The severed leg was buried in the hospital cemetery. Multiple people witnessed the burial.

For the next two and a half years, Pellicer was a familiar figure in Zaragoza. He begged for alms at the entrance to the Basilica del Pilar, sitting on the ground with one leg and a wooden stump. Hundreds of people saw him. Every evening, he asked the sanctuary servants for oil from the lamp that burned before the statue of the Virgin of the Pillar, and rubbed it on the stump of his amputated leg. He did this every night for two and a half years.

On the night of March 29th, 1640, Pellicer went to sleep in his parents' house in Calanda. He had one leg. He had rubbed the oil on the stump before bed, as he always did. Between half past ten and eleven that night, his mother entered the room and saw two feet protruding from beneath his cloak. She screamed. His father fell to his knees. The right leg, the one that had been amputated and buried nearly three years earlier, was attached to his body. It bore the same scars he had carried before the accident. It worked.

A formal ecclesiastical investigation was opened in June 1640. Over the following months, twenty-four witnesses gave sworn testimony before a canonical tribunal. Among them were the surgeons from the Hospital de Gracia who had performed the amputation. The notary's certificate, recording the first sworn testimony just days after the event, is still displayed in the Zaragoza town hall.

On April 27th, 1641, the Archbishop of Zaragoza formally declared the event a miracle.

The skeptical position is that Pellicer's leg was never fully amputated, that he bound his leg behind his thigh and faked the disability for two years while begging. The sworn testimony of the surgeons who performed the procedure makes this difficult to sustain. Even the most prominent skeptic to investigate the case conceded he could not prove it did not happen.

A man lost his leg. Surgeons cut it off. It was buried. He rubbed oil on the stump every night for two and a half years. Then the leg came back. Twenty-four people swore to it under oath. The notary's certificate is still in the town hall.

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