Alice’s Former Deaf-Mute Condition

Alice’s Former Deaf-Mute Condition is the prolonged inability to hear or speak that Alice Pagett experienced for seven years before suddenly regaining both abilities. Because examination found no physical damage to her ears or throat, doctors regarded the condition as psychological; its abrupt reversal nevertheless became the first major test of whether the events at St. Joseph’s could be called miraculous. The distinction between a medically observable recovery and a divinely caused one remains central to the account.

Condition and Recovery

Years before Alice’s recovery, specialists had found no physical malformation in her ears or throat. They believed her mind had prevented her from hearing and speaking, so that she neither heard nor spoke despite the absence of an identifiable bodily defect. Father Andrew Hagan later returned from the Sussex Hospital in Brighton, where Alice was undergoing tests, with confirmation that she could now both hear and speak. The doctors’ earlier account made the change striking, but did not itself establish what had caused it.

The subsequent medical findings reinforced the psychological explanation of the original condition. The examination disclosed no discernible damage to the auditory nerves or the structures of either ear, including the ossicles, cochlea, and eardrums; it also found no disease or damage to the laryngeal nerve. An earlier infection was considered possible, but there were no signs that it had persisted. The report described the condition as having been thought to result from hysteria. In this account, recovery is therefore neither presented as repair of a damaged organ nor reduced to a simple medical explanation: the bodily change was real, while its cause remained unsettled.

From Recovery to Miracle Claim

The public account soon linked Alice’s regained hearing and speech to her claimed vision of the Immaculate Conception. News broadcasts described her as having been deaf and mute until the vision, and placed her recovery alongside the cures attributed to her. That framing gave the condition a public and religious significance beyond Alice’s medical history. It also risked turning a complex psychological disability into evidence in a larger dispute over miracles.

Church officials drew a careful boundary around what the recovery could prove. Bishop Caines said the Church would not close its mind to the possibility of a miracle, but insisted that the matter required thorough investigation under strict guidelines. At a press conference, he described the six alleged cures as cases to be examined, not as established miracles. The medical bureau would review records, consult Alice’s doctors and hospital, conduct its own examinations, and pass its findings to the International Medical Committee. The medical bodies were to determine whether a cure was inexplicable under current science; deciding whether divine intervention had caused it belonged to the bishop and his advisers.

Criteria and Limits of Judgment

Monsignor Delgard explained that the medical investigation would consider whether a cure was sudden, complete, lasting, and achieved without convalescence, while also examining the seriousness and objective proof of the original illness and whether treatment had contributed to recovery. The cure would have to remain lasting over time, with three or four years suggested before confirmation. Most consequentially for Alice’s case, infirmity attributed to a mental disorder would rule out acceptance as a miraculous cure under the stated criteria. The medical finding that her condition had psychological origins thus complicated, rather than settled, the Church’s assessment.

The procedure separates three questions that public discussion tends to merge: whether Alice had been unable to hear and speak, whether she recovered, and whether the recovery had a supernatural cause. The first two could be examined through medical history and present ability; the third required a judgment outside the medical committee’s remit. The condition’s significance lies in this unresolved division of authority: the recovery is acknowledged, but neither that fact nor Alice’s claimed vision alone establishes a miracle.