Diseases

Illness is another common characteristic. Most stigmatics were ill and often bedridden. Saint Lidwina (1380–1433) had so many alleged illnesses that she was considered a genus from a pathological museum. Similarly, the German stigmatic Teresa Neumann (1898–1962) experienced successive bouts of convulsions, blindness, deafness, muteness, and paralysis.

A contemporary example is Audrey Santo (born 1983), a resident of Massachusetts, USA, who suffered severe brain damage after nearly drowning in her family swimming pool at the age of three. Since then, she has been in a coma-like state known as akinetic muteness, leaving her unable to communicate.