Alice Pagett's deafness and muteness

Alice Pagett's deafness and muteness are described as a seven-year disability without discernible lasting damage to the organs involved in hearing or speech. The medical findings support a psychological explanation rather than identifying a physical cause, but they do not settle the meaning of her recovery: the same account links her return to hearing and speech to the shock of a vision and leaves open whether that vision was imaginary or real.

Onset and Medical Findings

The medical team found no physical change in Alice Pagett’s ears or throat. There was no apparent damage to her auditory nerves, ossicles, cochleae, eardrums, vocal cords, or laryngeal nerve. Although an infection may have accompanied an illness seven years earlier, the examination found no sign that it had persisted. Inner-ear bone formation and membrane inflammation were absent, while mastoiditis and otitis media had already been discounted.

These findings consolidate the long-standing view that Alice’s condition had psychological origins. They do not establish that her symptoms were unreal: the report describes the absence of detectable structural damage, not the absence of the disability she experienced. The distinction matters to the story’s treatment of her condition, which is presented both as a concrete, prolonged inability to hear or speak and as an illness whose mechanism remains uncertain.

Psychological Explanation and Recovery

Monsignor Delgard explains that fear of being unable to hear or speak could have reinforced Alice’s mental block, with fear deepening the impairment over time. In this account, the subconscious mind sustains the condition through its own logic; a different and powerful shock then breaks the block. Delgard identifies the vision, whether imaginary or real, as the event that released Alice from what he calls a self-imposed illness.

Gerry Fenn challenges the implication that this explanation rules out a miracle cure. Delgard does not claim certainty about the original cause, and the medical team’s account is presented as a possible interpretation rather than an unquestionable verdict. He emphasizes instead the observable outcome: after seven years of silence, Alice can hear and speak. The narrative thus keeps the reported recovery distinct from any settled explanation of how it occurred.

The Condition and Collective Hysteria

At the episode in the field, Alice remains unable to hear or speak while kneeling near the oak. Gerry Fenn observes other children smiling, praying, or acting as though absorbed in the moment; afterward, several collapse or begin to weep as their families approach. Fenn interprets their behavior as a hypnotic state transmitted from Alice, but this is his conjecture, not a demonstrated medical finding. He compares the episode to the mass collapse of children at the Mansfield Marching Band Festival.

Later, Sue describes the experience as dreamlike and almost hypnotic. Fenn calls it hysteria and recalls that more than three hundred children collapsed at the festival; an investigation attributed that event to mass hysteria, although some doctors proposed organic poisoning after traces of malathion were found in the soil. Fenn notes that the traces were considered insufficient to explain the scale of the collapse, leaving the earlier case inconclusive. The comparison offers a psychological account for group behavior around Alice without resolving what caused her own seven-year condition or recovery.

Recurrence and Significance

The pattern of apparent collective distress recurs at a later service attended by people gathered around Alice. A nun faints, other congregants collapse, and Sue sways; then Gerry Fenn himself feels dizzy and sinks onto a bench. When Ben reaches out and touches Fenn’s cheek, the dizziness immediately leaves Fenn, while Ben shows no visible distress. The episode places a bodily reaction among the crowd beside an unexplained change in Fenn, but it does not establish that either resulted from Alice’s former deafness and muteness.

Across these scenes, the condition serves as a point where medical interpretation, social contagion, and claims of the miraculous meet without becoming equivalent explanations. The examination can rule against several physical disorders, and Delgard can describe a psychological mechanism, yet neither account erases Alice’s seven years without hearing or speech. Her recovery is certain within the narrative; its cause remains contested.