Lidwina was born at Schiedam in Dutch South Holland in 1380. On a winter outing in 1395, when she was fifteen, she fell while ice-skating and broke a rib. The internal injury became chronic. Over the following decades she developed progressive disability — paralysis, ulcerated wounds, blindness in one eye, partial deafness, and finally complete immobility. She would lie on her sickbed in Schiedam for thirty-eight years until her death in 1433.
From roughly 1405 — when her digestive system seemingly ceased to tolerate any food — she lived without nourishment beyond the Eucharist for the final 28 years of her life. The phenomenon was investigated by the magistrates of Schiedam and by ecclesiastical commissions, who appointed guards to watch her continuously; they confirmed she received nothing else. She also showed stigmata-like wounds, foretold events, and was visited by an enormous range of pilgrims including Margery Kempe and Thomas à Kempis. Canonised by Leo XIII in 1890.