For eight years, a Belgian farm worker carried a broken leg that simply would not heal. The two ends of the bone never joined. His lower leg hung loose, and the wound never closed. Then, one afternoon in 1875, he stood up and walked.

His name was Pierre De Rudder. In 1867, a falling tree crushed both bones of his lower left leg. The fracture refused to knit. For eight years he lived with an open, festering wound and a gap between the broken ends, so the foot could be turned almost all the way around. Splinters of dead bone worked their way out of the hole. Doctors told him the only answer was to cut the leg off. He refused. He could no longer work, and got about on crutches, in constant pain.

On the seventh of April 1875, De Rudder made an agonising journey to a shrine at Oostakker, near Ghent, a copy of the grotto at Lourdes. He knelt to pray. Moments later, without thinking, he stood, let go of his crutches, and walked. The wound had closed. The two ends of bone had joined. Witnesses said the leg that had been broken for eight years was suddenly whole, the scar already looking old.

Here is what makes this more than a story. De Rudder lived another twenty three years. When he died, doctors dug up his leg bones to see for themselves. The shin bone showed exactly where the long gap had been bridged by new bone. A cast of those bones still sits in the medical bureau at Lourdes today. In 1908, the Church declared the healing a miracle.

But the case has fierce critics. There are no proper medical records from those eight years, only the sworn word of his employer, his neighbours, and his family. One doctor's letters about the leg were lost for decades. Skeptics argue the wound healed slowly, and the moment was dressed up afterward as instant. Believers point to the bones. The bones are real. What happened in that one minute at Oostakker is the question. You can go and see them.

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