John Traynor was wounded at the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915 — shrapnel lodged in his head, multiple bullet wounds, his right arm paralysed and his legs partially paralysed from a spinal injury. After eight operations, including a trepanning that left a hole in his skull about an inch across covered only by a metal plate, he was discharged in 1916 with a 100% disability pension. Epileptic seizures came on regularly; his legs grew worse; by 1920 he was virtually bedridden.
Against medical advice, on the 1923 Liverpool Lourdes pilgrimage he insisted on travelling. After the fourth immersion in the baths on July 25, 1923 — the feast of St. James — he came out cured. He walked, ran, his arm worked, the trepanning hole in his skull had closed. Cured of epilepsy, of paralysis, and of the skull defect simultaneously. The Lourdes Medical Bureau examined him repeatedly until his death in 1943; the local bishop of Liverpool formally recognised the cure as miraculous. Traynor lived twenty more years, fathered six children, and worked as a coal-haulier — manual labour his cured arm and legs permitted.