Marie Bailly was a 22-year-old Frenchwoman dying of advanced tuberculous peritonitis, with a distended abdomen, vomiting, and pulse 150. Her family had been told by the Lyon hospital that she could not survive the train journey to Lourdes. They took her anyway. Travelling on the same train as a chaperoning medical observer was Dr. Alexis Carrel — a 28-year-old agnostic surgeon already famous for his pioneering work on vascular suture (the technique that would win him the 1912 Nobel Prize in Medicine).
Carrel had agreed to observe Marie precisely because he expected to certify her death at the grotto and so debunk the Lourdes phenomenon. He kept her under continuous observation. As her stretcher was carried down to the bath on May 28, 1902, three pitchers of grotto water were poured over her abdomen. Carrel — pen in hand, watching — saw the distended belly visibly flatten before his eyes. Within hours she was eating; the next morning she walked; by the second week she had returned to Lyon and entered a convent (she became a Sister of Charity and lived another 35 years).
Carrel could not in good conscience deny what he had seen. He published a careful account (initially under the pseudonym 'Dr. Lerrac') and was professionally damaged for it in the secular French academic world — denied a chair at Lyon, he eventually went to the Rockefeller Institute in New York where his career resumed. The 1912 Nobel committee, citing only his vascular work, made no mention. He died Catholic in 1944; his posthumously published Voyage to Lourdes is one of the foundational medical-theological documents on the Lourdes phenomenon.