John Traynor

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The story of John Traynor, an Irishman born in 1883, is one of the most famous cases to be associated with Lourdes and its supposed healing powers.

After being drafted into the Royal Navy in 1914, the ship on which he sailed was posted to Egypt, where he had at least two head wounds inflicted upon him. Furthermore, he suffered bullet wounds in his chest, with one bullet becoming lodged close to vital nerves in his shoulder, which rendered his right arm completely paralysed.

Traynor refused to heed the advice of surgeons, who urged him to agree to have his right arm amputated. Worse was to follow, however. He began to suffer epileptic fits, was unable to control his bodily functions, and by 1923 was a virtual paraplegic.

During this year, it came to his attention that an excursion was planned to Lourdes by the Liverpool diocese and, ignoring pleas from people who thought that the strain of the journey would kill him, he travelled with the rest of the pilgrims to France.

It soon became apparent that the concern that his fellow travellers had displayed at the outset of the journey were being realized, for his condition deteriorated and he suffered another epileptic fit, and after being admitted to a Lourdes hospital, his epilepsy and paraplegia were officially recorded. It was only two days later that Traynor was taken down to the baths and afterwards to the ceremony of the Blessed Sacrament.

It was here that he felt a tingling sensation in his right arm, and he eventually realized that he could at last move the limb that had been paralysed for the previous eight years. Later that day he could walk seven steps, and he began to feel his reflexes returning. Little by little, Traynor began to feel his limbs returning to normal use, and the following morning he rose from his bed unaided and ran outside for about a half a mile.

Shortly after this remarkable occurrence, the pilgrims with whom he had travelled were due to return to Liverpool, but before their departure doctors conducted another examination on Traynor. They were amazed at the extraordinary transformation of his physical condition. Having recovered the use of his lower limbs, he could now walk quite normally, and his right arm had been restored to the condition it had been in prior to the wounds that had been inflicted.

Moreover, his epilepsy appeared to have been cured, and doctors also recorded that a hole in his skull that had troubled him for years had all but disappeared. What was equally surprising was the fact that Traynor initially found it very difficult to recall any details of the crippling illness that had beset him for so long. Further examinations were carried out on Traynor on his return to Liverpool, which only confirmed what the medical team at Lourdes already knew.

With the evident freedom of movement that he now enjoyed, Traynor was able to work again and, as if to prove once and for all that he had been cured, he set up his own business, occasionally carrying huge sacks of coal with his previously paralysed arm. Because the Government had classed Traynor as 'an incurable and powerless epileptic', he was entitled to a 100 per cent state pension.

Evidently, however, Traynor was anything but 'incurable' and 'powerless', and he wrote to the Ministry of Pensions to inform it of his recovery. He was told that he would continue to receive his pension because his 'condition' was such that he would never regain the health that he had once enjoyed.

Traynor continued to make the pilgrimage to Lourdes almost every year until he died in 1943 at the age of sixty.