On the morning of the twenty-fifth of February, 1858, a fourteen-year-old asthmatic French peasant girl knelt in the mud of a small grotto outside the Pyrenean town of Lourdes and dug at the ground with her bare hands. A small muddy stream of water appeared. The spring has flowed continuously since that morning, one hundred and twenty thousand litres a day. Seventy of the cures attributed to it have been formally recognised by the Catholic Church as miracles.

Her name was Bernadette Soubirous. She was fourteen. Between the eleventh of February and the sixteenth of July, 1858, she reported eighteen apparitions of a young woman dressed in white in the small grotto of Massabielle on the bank of the Gave de Pau river outside Lourdes. On the ninth apparition the figure told her to drink at the spring and wash there. There was no spring at the grotto. She dug.

The first medically documented cure happened four days later. A Catalan woman named Catherine Latapie of Loubajac immersed her partially paralysed right arm in the new spring on the first of March, 1858. The paralysis resolved. In 1883 the Catholic Bishop of Tarbes established the Lourdes Medical Bureau to investigate all subsequent claimed cures. The Bureau and its associated International Medical Committee of Lourdes, a body of around thirty independent specialist physicians of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, agnostic, and atheist conviction, have since 1883 received approximately seven thousand applications. Two thousand five hundred have been classified as medically inexplicable. Seventy of those inexplicable cures have been separately and formally recognised by the relevant diocesan bishop as miracles. The most recent was declared a miracle in 2018.

Bernadette Soubirous herself died of tubercular bone disease at the convent of Saint-Gildard at Nevers in central France on the sixteenth of April, 1879, aged thirty-five. Her body was formally exhumed for canonical investigation in 1909, in 1919, and in 1925. On each occasion, by the deposition of the named Catholic clergy and named French medical specialists present, the body was found to be incorrupt. It is on permanent public display today in a glass-and-bronze reliquary at the Saint-Gildard convent at Nevers. The spring she dug in 1858 still flows. Six million pilgrims visit it every year.

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