§ 188.3. =Stigmatizations.=--In many cases these marks were found to have been fraudulently made, but in other cases it was questionable whether we had not here a pathological problem, or whether hysteria created a desire to deceive or pre-disposed the subject to being duped under clerical influence. =Anna Cath. Emmerich=, a nun of Dülmen in Westphalia, in 1812, professed to have on her body bloody wound-marks of the Saviour. For five years down to her death in 1824, the poet Brentano sat at her feet, venerating her as a saint and listening to her ecstatic revelations on the death and sufferings of the Redeemer and his mother. Overberg, Sailer, and Von Stolberg were also satisfied of the genuineness of her revelations and of the miraculous marking of her body. The physician Von Drussel examined the wound-prints and certified them as miraculous; but Bodde, professor of chemistry at Münster, pronounced the blood marks spots produced by dragon’s-blood. Competent physicians declared her a hysterical woman incapable of distinguishing between dream and reality, truth and lies, honesty and deceit. Others famous in the same line were Maria von Wörl, Dominica Lazzari, and =Crescentia Stinklutsch=; also Dorothea Visser of Holland and Juliana Weiskircher from near Vienna. § 188.4. Of a very doubtful kind were the miraculous marks on =Louise Lateau=, daughter of a Belgian miner. On 24th April, 1868, it is said she was marked with the print of the Saviour’s wounds on hands, feet, side, brow, and shoulders. In July, A.D. 1868, she fell into an ecstasy, from which she could be awakened only by her bishop or one authorized by him. Trustworthy physicians, after a careful medical examination, reported that she laboured under a disease which they proposed to call “stigmatic neuropathy.” Chemical analysis proved the presence of food which had been regularly taken, probably in a somnambulistic trance. In the summer of 1875 her sister for a time put an end to the affair by refusing the clergy entrance into the house, and she was then obliged to eat, drink, and sleep like other Christians, so that the Friday bloody marks disappeared. But now, say ultramontane journals, Louise became dangerously ill, and clergy were called in to her help, and the marks were again visible. Her patron Bishop Dumont of Tournay being deposed by the pope in 1879, she took part against his successor, and was threatened with excommunication (§ 200, 7). She was now deserted by the ultramontanes and Belgian clergy, and treated as a poor, weak-minded invalid. She died neglected and in obscurity in A.D. 1883.