Anna Santaniello was a 41-year-old Italian woman with advanced rheumatic heart disease — Bouillaud's disease — that had ravaged her mitral valve and produced severe pulmonary oedema, peripheral cyanosis, and the inability to walk or speak more than a few words at a time. Her doctors in Salerno had told her there was no further treatment.
She travelled to Lourdes on the UNITALSI pilgrimage of August 1952. Bathed in the piscines (the baths fed by the spring) on August 19, she was instantly cured: pulse normal, cyanosis gone, walking and speaking freely. The Lourdes Medical Bureau followed her for over fifty years. On November 9, 2005, after the cure had remained complete and durable for over half a century, the Archbishop of Salerno formally recognised it as the 67th miraculous Lourdes cure. She lived to age 99, dying in 2010.