Missionaries play a central role in the classic narrative of the introduction of Western medicine to China: introducing bio-medical techniques, translating textbooks, staffing clinics and building hospitals (Wong and Wu Reference Wong and Lien-Teh1932).Footnote ¹ Thus, it was missionaries who laid the foundations for the development of a scientific ideology and medical infrastructure that both legitimated the modern state and increased its power over its citizens. At the heart of the process was the state's rejection of other forms of healing as superstition, with the exception of what is now known as Traditional Chinese Medicine which was transformed into something institutionally and functionally similar to Western medicine (Rogaski Reference Rogaski2004; Taylor Reference Taylor2005; Yang 2006). In this way, the activities of medical missionaries are neatly divided into familiar categories of science (their medical practice) and religion (their evangelism). Missionaries whose healing practice was strongly shaped by their belief in the supernatural have usually been ignored altogether. If, however, we switch our focus from men to women, and from Protestants to Catholics, the picture changes, destabilizing our categories and foregrounding similarities between traditional European and Chinese religious cultures and healing practices.Footnote ² Turning away from the grand narrative makes it hard to work on a similarly grand scale, so this paper is a case study that tells the story of a single Italian nun, Assunta Pallotta, who died in China in 1905 and became the focus of a local healing cult which continues to the present day among Catholics in central Shanxi, but which was also briefly a global phenomenon reaching as far as the United States and Tunisia.

The link between missionaries and biomedicine has been constructed by focusing on the Protestant missionaries who joined the Medical Missionary Society founded in China by two doctors, one British and one American, in 1838. This society and its successors were open only to those who had graduated from a medical college and they specifically included in their aims the promotion of the science (Balme Reference Balme1921, 41–2; Wong and Wu Reference Wong and Lien-Teh1932, 312). Following these doctors' own highly exclusive definition of a medical missionary, scholars such as G.H. Choa (Reference Choa1990) have created a story of missionary contributions to China's medical modernization that does not represent the full range of missionary activity and its associated medical practices. The nuns who promoted the cult of Assunta Pallotta do not fit the definition, but they were medical missionaries insofar as they ran a hospital and dispensary, prescribed medicines, and one was said to have been known locally as “the great physician of the West” (Salotti Reference Salotti1936, 150). However, they were not promoters of Western biomedicine to the exclusion of Chinese medical traditions. Instead, they employed doctors of classical Chinese medicine in their clinics and promoted types of divine healing that intersected with local folk medicine.

The characters in this story are mostly women: Italian and French missionary nuns, the Chinese Catholic religious known as Virgins, and women across the world who sought healing for themselves or family members.Footnote ³ Women's roles in the family in both Europe and China at this time included care for the sick, especially children and the chronically ill, and thus made nursing a natural role for missionary women as well as putting Chinese women at the heart of the search for healing for their families. Moreover, the founding miracle of the story, a sweet fragrance noticed at Assunta Pallotta's death, was first interpreted as divine approval of her humility and became part of religious women's struggle for power within the male-dominated institution of the church. The cult of Assunta Pallotta was thus shaped by gendered global networks of power that were characteristic of nineteenth and early twentieth century Western imperialism.

The ideas and practices associated with Assunta Pallotta's cult suggest that we need to rethink the linked and apparently exclusive categories of Chinese or Western, scientific or religious, by which we understand the introduction of Western medicine to China.Footnote ⁴ Essential to the cult of Assunta Pallotta were ideas about the deaths of holy people, the power of their miraculously preserved bodies, and the use of healing water sanctified by contact with sacred objects; these are ideas which have a long tradition in both China and Europe. Moreover, those who sought her cures ignored the boundaries between different medical traditions, moving from one practitioner to another and combining Western biomedicine with Traditional Chinese Medicine, local folk medicine, and the search for divine intervention.Footnote ⁵ Meanwhile, the institutions of the Catholic Church in Rome, which were essential in validating the cult, did so by employing the personnel and techniques of biomedicine to prove the miracle of the incorrupt body and the healings that followed. In the story of Assunta Pallotta's cult medicine and miracles, science and religion, Chinese and Western cease to be opposed categories and become merely aspects of a single process through which our modern globalized world was formed.

A Miraculous Death

Assunta Pallotta came to China in 1904 as a member of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary to work in an orphanage in the village of Dongergou in Shanxi. The winter there was harsh and the village regularly suffered from water shortages in the spring, so the villagers were accustomed to annual outbreaks of what they called shanghan (literally ‘cold-harm’) which the Western missionaries translated as typhus. The orphanage, which often took in sick and dying children, was particularly susceptible and in the spring of 1905, some of the girls became ill and died. Assunta Pallotta and four other nuns succumbed. Assunta was treated by a local doctor of Chinese medicine, who assured the nuns that her illness was mild, but Assunta herself was convinced from the start that she would die. She was ill for three weeks and towards the end was delirious for many days. Eventually she could no longer speak and it was clear to all that she was indeed dying. On the evening of April 7, 1905 the seven missionary nuns and four of the Chinese Virgins who worked in the orphanage gathered at her bedside while a priest read the prayers for the dying. As he prayed, the French mother superior Marie Symphorien turned around and asked if anyone had scattered powder or perfume, because she smelled a sweet fragrance that she later described as like olive oil, milk, roses, or coxcomb flowers. She asked each of those present in turn and none could reply, until several people spoke at once saying that the scent must come from heaven. They turned back again and shortly afterwards Assunta died and the scent vanished (Federici Reference Federici1954, 186–92; Loppinot Reference Loppinot1924, 42–56; Chen Reference Chen and Hede1920, 56–60, 67–8).

This fleeting scent in a room as a young woman died is the moment when the miracle was produced. Indeed, this was the single moment that would lead to the formation of the cult, for up until the moment of her death no one had ever paid much attention to Assunta Pallotta. Perhaps the most telling comments on her life are those of the nun in charge of the group in which she travelled to China, who replied to later questions by saying that Assunta was so humble and quiet that no one noticed her, or the author of a booklet written at the time of her beatification who summarized her life as “a prodigy of normality, a story without words, we could say, almost without deeds” (Federici Reference Federici1954, 160, 209). Even now it is very difficult to find out much about her life because the many accounts that are available were all written with a strictly hagiographic purpose in mind. In the early years after her death, she was depicted as a model of humility, obedience, and the kinds of physical self-mortification much admired by Italian Catholics of her generation. By the 1920s she was described as an innocent childlike spirit who understood truths deeper than science, and a laborer who was the daughter of peasants. When she was beatified in 1954 she became a martyr for China under Communist oppression. Today she is depicted as a model of humility and of devotion to the Eucharist. These interpretations still leave the historian wondering why this particular devout and humble young woman was recognized as dying in the odor of sanctity.

Assunta Pallotta was born in 1878, the eldest child of five children of an impoverished tenant farmer in the hills of central Italy. She was withdrawn from the village school at the age of eight to help care for her brothers and later worked as a mason's assistant fetching the bricks and stones, before being apprenticed to a tailor. A hard-working, pious girl, she fasted three days a week, went to the church daily, joined the parish girls' group, put pieces of brick in her bed to make it uncomfortable, and refused to go to dances. She hoped to become a nun, but faced difficulties because her family was unable to afford the dowry demanded by most religious orders. In the end she succeeded through the aid of a local bishop with good connections in Rome who arranged for her to enter the recently established order of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary (Federici Reference Federici1954, 23–70; Loppinot Reference Loppinot1924, 9–16).

The order had been founded by Hélène de Chappotin, who belonged to an aristocratic French family with large plantations in the Caribbean, and it was structured according to a rigid class system in which the nuns were divided into two groups depending on the size of the dowry they brought with them (Launay Reference Launay2001, 25–31; Guo Quanzhi Reference Guo2007, 73). Assunta Pallotta's complete lack of a dowry and limited education shaped her life in the order: during her novitiate outside Rome she did farmwork; later she was transferred to Florence where she cleaned, cooked, did the laundry, gardened, cared for the sick, and slept in the clothes store. The biographies praise her for her obedience and humility, but this was won at a personal cost. In her first year as a novice, she became ill with a glandular swelling, and at one point wrote to her parents saying she knew they were disappointed that she was doing farmwork. After her arrival in China she worked in the orphanage kitchen and laundry alongside the Chinese women. They taught her to recite the rosary in Chinese, by pointing to the beads, and to stumble through a few Chinese sentences: later one of them remembered Assunta pointing to the kitchen fire and saying that purgatory for sinners would be like that but worse. At the time of Assunta's death her personal notebook was found. In it she reminded herself that she had originally been willing to enter a religious order as a servant and since she had entered “this great institute” through charity, she should always obey her superiors promptly and blindly (Federici Reference Federici1954, 95–134; Baola Dapula Reference Baola Dapula and Ande2003, 19, 66; Sinarum seu Tuscolana 1923, 65–6).

Assunta Pallotta's humility and obedience grew out of her lower class background, but at the same time she was acting out forms of feminine virtue idealized by the order's aristocratic elite: Hélène de Chappotin had instructed that the Missionaries of Mary should aspire to be like the Virgin Mary in Nazareth, who was humble, unseen, and obedient to God. Like the better known Gemma Galgani, another Italian woman of this generation, Assunta Pallotta appears to have embraced suffering as a way of making sense for herself of what we might easily see as forms of oppression that resulted from her gender and class.Footnote ⁶ Despite the many interpretations of the biographies she was not a blank slate: her obedience and suffering were products of her humble background as well as forms of behavior she chose, in doing so creating for herself a character which formed the backdrop onto which the various narratives of her sanctity would later be projected.

Just as important in the creation of the miracle, however, were the women kneeling around her in prayer as she died. These women were drawn from the two separate and conflicting groups who were working in the orphanage at the time: the European members of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary and the Chinese Catholic Virgins who had run the orphanage before the arrival of the Europeans two years earlier. The practice of Catholic women swearing virginity for life and living in their natal homes dated back to the eighteenth century in Shanxi (Wan Reference Wan1792).Footnote ⁷ In 1835 two Virgins were among seventeen local Christians who were beaten and exiled because they refused to step on a crucifix (Ricci Reference Ricci1929, 63). From the mid-nineteenth century the number of missionaries grew, and they invited some of these women to come together to manage various new projects. The orphanage where Assunta died had been established in the 1860s and its first director was a Virgin who was literate and was praised not only for her kindness and piety, but also for the medical skills she learned from her father, a well-known doctor (Feliciani Reference Feliciani1865). Other Virgins taught catechism and reading in village girls' schools (Villeret Reference Villeret1888). As unmarried daughters, Virgins had a subordinate position in the family home, but some nevertheless achieved considerable respect as religious experts. Most Catholic villages were visited by a priest only once a year and in the priest's absence Virgins were often responsible for preparing Catholics for death and sometimes also for preaching. During the Boxer Uprising, shortly before Assunta Pallotta's arrival in China, ten Virgins in Central Shanxi were martyred, several of them as recognized religious leaders: Wang Lanlan preached repeatedly to the Christians gathered in the church courtyard on the love of Jesus and the blessedness of martyrdom while the village of Sanxian was under attack, and raised a crucifix as the Boxers finally broke into the building (Ricci Reference Ricci1925, 177–80). By this time the Virgins in central Shanxi also had plans to establish their own religious order (Grassi Reference Grassi1896). The Virgins present at Assunta Pallotta's death were the inheritors of this tradition and unsurprisingly were often at odds with the newly arrived European nuns who sought to control them.

When Hélène de Chappotin founded the Missionaries of Mary, she conceived of the management of indigenous religious women (like the Chinese Virgins) as part of the function of the order. Indeed, this issue was at the heart of the dispute that led to the founding of the order: De Chappotin had originally joined a religious order called the Réparatrices and gone to India, where she rose to the position of superior but came into conflict with the Jesuit priests in the area over the control of a group of Indian sisters who wanted to operate autonomously. The resultant dispute ended only with her expulsion from the order, after which she went on to found the Missionaries of Mary (Launay Reference Launay2001, 83–90). The dispute was part of the process through which she demanded and received greater autonomy from male authority, but in the mission field this autonomy meant precisely control over previously autonomous indigenous religious women. Thirty years later in Shanxi, Marie Symphorien found herself fighting the same battle. The first group of nuns had arrived in Taiyuan in 1899 and were all killed the following year in the Boxer Uprising. The bishop at the time had not wanted them, claiming that European nuns in other Chinese provinces were young, uneducated, and had nothing to do. After Marie Symphorien's arrival, she found that the Chinese Virgins did not wish to accept her authority and that they were supported by the European priests. She ultimately lost the battle: the Chinese Virgins were allowed by the bishop to establish their own religious order based in the village, whereas most of the European nuns left and the remainder moved away to the provincial capital (Grassi Reference Grassi1891; Massi Reference Massi1909; Arcari Reference Arcari1913; Yasongda, 46; Gandolfi Reference Gandolfi1987, 308).

In 1905 this conflict between the European nuns and the Chinese Virgins was in its early stages, and Marie Symphorien articulated it in terms of humility and submission versus pride and disobedience. When Assunta Pallotta arrived Marie Symphorien was delighted at her obedience and took every opportunity to display it to the other members of the community. She did this by telling Assunta to do things that were hard indeed because they were designed specifically to make her look foolish due to her humble origins, such as making a daily inspection of the orphanage as if she were the mother superior (a role to which she could never aspire) or taking the convent dog out for a walk (bizarre behavior in a Chinese village which made the villagers and some of the nuns laugh). While Assunta did these things Marie Symphorien made the other women go out and watch her. Whether it was because of these demands or her difficulties in the kitchen, where she could hardly speak to the Chinese, Assunta became so desperate that she wrote to the superior of the order in Rome saying that she doubted her vocation (Sinarum seu Tuscolana 1923, 201, 334; Loppinot Reference Loppinot1924, 33, 41).

So when, as Assunta lay dying, Marie Symphorien looked around the assembled women and asked them to confirm the presence of a sweet scent, everyone would have been aware that this would prove Assunta's great virtue and establish her blind obedience as a model for the rest of the community. The idea that a sweet fragrance at death marked the transition of the soul from earth directly to heaven, and thus was a marker of Christian sanctity, dated back to late antiquity and was particularly important in verifying the holiness of cloistered or otherwise unrecognized women religious (Harvey Reference Harvey2006; Classen Reference Classen and Drobnik2006; Evans Reference Evans2002). In this case it is striking that the scent is described as being like olive oil and milk, European food products unobtainable in Shanxi (Chen Reference Chen and Hede1920, 60). The scent of paradise that was transmitted through Assunta Pallotta's body was quite literally nostalgic, but also very explicitly not Chinese. If Assunta's life and her personal spirituality were shaped by her social class, the moment of her death was shaped by struggles over the nature of European power in the wider world, for it is was these struggles that gave meaning to that brief fragrance that filled the room as Assunta Pallotta died and thus produced from the personal experience of those present the miracle as a social fact.

However, the miracle was created not just by those who were present as Assunta Pallotta died but also by the crowds of local people drawn by the news who later smelled the same scent all over the orphanage and along the route of the funeral procession. The immediacy of scent, its invisibility, its emotional pull, and the impossibility of expressing it in words have made fragrance a marker of divine presence in Buddhism as well as Christianity. Sweet fragrances marking the deaths of Chinese Buddhist monks have a history dating back to at least the eighth century (Faure Reference Faure1991, 150–52).Footnote ⁸ They had also become part of local Catholic culture. When the Virgin Hu Guiniu was killed by Boxers in 1900, a sweet scent of roses was said to have filled the air, which the village's lay leader explained as being due to the presence of the Virgin Mary, and Hu's body, which had been thrown into a well, was later found to be incorrupt (Ricci Reference Ricci1911–13, (32) 15–17). Thus the news of Assunta Pallotta's death as it spread through the villages fit into a well-established cultural pattern that was easy for people to understand, interpret, and pass on. It was these Chinese networks, not the church establishment, who spread the news of what had happened. The only priests to visit were Chinese; none of the foreign missionaries in the area came. Indeed, more than two weeks after the death, one of the local Italian missionaries wrote to the bishop for information having heard the news from his Chinese parishioners (Pucello Reference Pucello1905). On the scene, the nuns described the crowds of pilgrims surrounding the orphanage, who impressed the nuns with their piety as they knelt at the door and made the sign of the cross before entering the room where Assunta's body was laid out. Not only did the whole village, young and old, turn out for the funeral, but also people who came from considerable distances. When they returned from the cemetery to the orphanage, the whole building was full of scent which was stronger and more long-lasting than before until the moment exactly three days after Assunta's death, when it finally vanished (Loppinot Reference Loppinot1924, 57).

For a miracle to be recognized as such it has to make sense to the community where it occurs and to matter to them.Footnote ⁹ The scent that was noticed at Assunta Pallotta's death was just such a miracle: it mattered to the immediate community of women in the little village orphanage where it occurred because it was interpreted as divine approval of the highly contested virtues of obedience to ecclesiastical superiors, and specifically European superiors, that Assunta had embodied for them that year. But the story of the scent at Assunta Pallotta's death also made sense to a much wider community in the nearby villages who knew nothing of Assunta's virtues, but interpreted the scent as a mark of spiritual power and passed on the news to their neighbors. Their excitement was reinforced when they, too, could smell the scent, so that the pilgrims who came laid the basis for the belief in Assunta's powers. This pattern of interaction between the global institutions of the Catholic Church and the ideas and practices of the local Chinese community was to be at the heart of Assunta's cult.

An Incorrupt Body

Eight years later, in 1913, Assunta Pallotta's body was disinterred, at the request of Marie Symphorien and on the authority of Bishop Eugenio Massi, to make a formal identification of the body and to see if the scent at her death had been followed by the miraculous preservation of her body. Priests, nuns, Virgins, and a crowd of villagers gathered at the grave in Dongergou and the coffin was lifted out. As it was raised, part of it disintegrated into dust, but the body was still intact and was taken to the chapel of the diocesan cemetery outside the provincial capital. There Francesco Bianchieri, an Italian physician, examined the body and wrote up a report for the diocese. Under his direction the nuns removed the clothes, which had rotted, wiped the skin with alcohol to clear away the dust and mould and to prevent the body deteriorating through contact with the air, put on a new habit made of silk, and weighed the body and laid it in the sun to be photographed. Bianchieri noted in his report that because Assunta Pallotta had died of typhus, an intestinal disease, one would expect rapid putrefaction beginning from the abdomen, but this had not taken place. He described the characteristic angle of her head, the face that was the color of old ivory or parchment, the preservation of the eyes, hair and extremities, and the rigid joints, suggesting the preservation of the system of ligaments that were still holding the hands together in prayer. He concluded with the words:

A few days later, the body was placed in a metal-lined, glass fronted coffin and interred in the diocesan cemetery.

Bianchieri's words make it obvious that the incorrupt body, like the fragrance at the moment of death, is not only something that is experienced but something that has to be framed in words before it is a miracle. Moreover, these words must be the technical language of medicine, particularly anatomy, and in this case they are accompanied by the modern scientific evidence of photography.Footnote ¹¹ Thus Bianchieri describes Assunta Pallota's “dorsal decubitus” posture rather than saying that she was lying on her back, and the angle of her head on her “thorax.” For the official processes of the church, an incorrupt body was evidence that the deceased was indeed a saint who had gone directly to heaven where there could be no corruption of the flesh. To prove this required an investigation by a doctor and an objective examination that expressly used anatomical terms and deductive reasoning. Photography provided additional scientific evidence for the doctor's report. The process followed the model of an autopsy accompanying a judicial investigation (Park Reference Park1994, Reference Park2006; Duffin Reference Duffin2007; Vidal Reference Vidal2007). Thus it is the doctor's evidence that matters in judging the miracle and it matters because it is framed in the modern scientific language of medical professionals.

Francesco Bianchieri was a medical missionary by any conventional definition. He was a European trained physician employed by the diocese to work in the newly established mission hospital in Taiyuan. Local accounts of the development of Western medicine in Shanxi include Bianchieri and Saint Joseph's Catholic Hospital as part of the history of medical modernization (Zhu Reference Zhu1986). Bishop Eugenio Massi was strongly committed to the idea that missionaries should contribute to China's modernization. After the 1911 revolution, he established a prestigious high school that received funding and a donation of scientific equipment from the new governor, and tried (unsuccessfully) to establish a Chinese newspaper, as well as setting up the hospital and employing Bianchieri (Acta 1917 (36), 32; Chen Guodi Reference Chen1913).Footnote ¹² For the diocese to pay for a hospital of Western medicine was something earlier bishops had hoped for (to enable them to compete with the much wealthier British and American Protestant missionary societies) and had been made possible by funds from the Boxer Indemnity (Archives de l'Oeuvre 1898; Harrison unpubl.).

The emphasis on Western medicine was a major change for the missionaries: before Bianchieri's arrival, the clinic run by the nuns had employed local doctors of Chinese medicine and the missionaries themselves were usually treated by Chinese doctors. When Hugolin Villeret was sick in Geliaogou village in the 1890s, he saw a Catholic doctor who took his six pulses, diagnosed an internal fire due to exhaustion and chills, and prescribed three medicines and a diet of millet gruel while accurately predicting the course of the disease. Villeret teased the bishop who had seen the British Protestant doctor and received Western medicine for the same complaint—of course European purges were unsuitable for the climate and had left him ill for longer (De Kerval Reference De Kerval1902, 192–95). Another missionary received acupuncture and a medicine to make him sweat. When this did not overcome the pain in his bones and throat, but instead gave him intense stomach pain, he saw two more local doctors and three of his parishioners made a pilgrimage on his behalf. Eventually he was cured by a peasant who advised him to exercise his stomach and spine and gave him a purge (Antonelli Reference Antonelli1905). As late as 1912, a newly arrived missionary writing home to his mother told her not to worry about his health as the Chinese, too, had medicines, possibly more potent than European medicines (Lombardi Reference Lombardi1968, 336).Footnote ¹³

Bianchieri was the only qualified doctor of Western medicine ever to be employed by Saint Joseph's Hospital. His presence marked the hospital as a modernizing institution, but it seems likely that he was also employed so that he could provide scientific validation of the miracle of Assunta Pallotta's incorrupt body. He was devout, generous, and a popular doctor, but he was expensive for the diocese and only a couple of years after Pallotta's disinterment, when Bishop Massi left, he resigned. The explanation for this handed down among the diocese's Chinese priests was that Massi, who came from the same part of Italy as Assunta Pallotta, was willing to bear the cost of a foreign doctor because he needed him for the campaign for her beatification, but the new bishop was not prepared to continue these payments. Thereafter, until it was taken over by the Communist government in the 1950s, the hospital relied on a local man trained by Bianchieri and then a succession of nuns, only one of whom had any formal medical training (Guo Quanzhi Reference Guo2007, 69–70; Guo Chongxi Reference Guo1992, 233–34; Li and Yan Reference Li and Fu1964).

Bianchieri's verification of the miracle of Assunta's incorrupt body was effective because of his position as a doctor of Western biomedicine, but at the same time the evidence he provided linked Assunta to powerful traditions of holiness that made sense in both China and Europe. The incorrupt bodies of Buddhist monks lay on the altars of Chinese temples just as the bodies of Catholic saints still lie in glass cases beneath altars in Italian churches, and both used to receive the prayers of the faithful. In both cases the body's resistance to decay is understood as a sign of spiritual purity: the similarity was obvious to Matteo Ricci, who visited the temples at Hanshan in the sixteenth century and saw the body of the great eighth century Buddhist monk Huineng (Ricci [Reference Ricci and Gallagher1953], 222–23). Some Buddhist monks were said to prepare their bodies for preservation by fasting and their bodies were later lacquered and gilded for presentation to the faithful. These practices continued into the twentieth century: leading monks requested that their bodies be stored for three years and then, if preserved, gilded in Taiwan in 1959 and Hong Kong in 1962 (Faure Reference Faure1991, 151–52; Sharf Reference Sharf1992; Welch Reference Welch1967, 343–44; Yetts Reference Yetts1911, 709–24). In medieval and early modern Europe such incorrupt bodies were thought to produce a healing balm (Camporesi Reference Camporesi and Croft-Murray1988, 3, 8). A similar balm is reported in the classic sixteenth century Chinese pharmaceutical text, the Bencao gangmu, which describes how in a distant land there are said to be men who refuse food and drink except for honey until they die and are then embalmed in honey and sealed for a hundred years to produce a medicine that will heal wounds (Li Reference Li2004, 3580). The links between such ideas, folk religion, and healing are suggested by the story of Granny Wang (Wang nainai), a divine figure worshipped in the Beijing area for her healing power. She was said to have been a poor woman who worked as a hired laborer; in one tale she carried bricks up a mountain to build a temple, until eventually she entered a temple and sat still until she transformed into a flesh-body (roushen), the term used for the mummified bodies of Buddhist masters (Yang 2006, 211).

Assunta Pallotta's body was recognized as incorrupt through a biomedical process required by the church authorities and was closely linked to the diocese's role in helping to introduce Western medicine to the city. However, the effect of this scientific verification was to create a belief in prayer to Assunta Pallotta as a source of healing power which spread both locally and into the wider world.

Healing Relics

In 1915, a woman known in our sources as Micalina Kia came to the orphanage seeking a cure for a festering arm. One of the European nuns, Marie N.D. de Foye, reported that Kia had already been treated for this with acupuncture on the head which had then become infected and that a Chinese doctor had said that the injuries were incurable. Marie N.D. de Foye agreed with this Chinese diagnosis and so she suggested that the family pray to Assunta Pallotta. She took a scrap of Assunta's habit and applied it to Micalina's wounds while continuing to apply poultices to her arm. She then gave her some Western medicine (iron tablets) and a fragment of the coffin in which Assunta had been dug up. Micalina boiled the coffin fragment in water that she then used to wash the wound. Marie N.D. de Foye left the village shortly after this and when she returned a month later, Micalina came to see her again, recovered (Sinarum seu Tuscolana 1923, 408–9). A few years later, on the other side of the globe in a small town in northern Italy, a woman called Rosa de Fedrigotti Bossi was suffering from terrible stomach pains that had come and gone for ten years. Like Micalina Kia, she had consulted doctors and tried various remedies, none of which had worked. In the spring of 1920 her condition worsened and a nun of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary suggested that she try prayer to Assunta Pallotta who had died in the odor of sanctity, told her of some of the wonders already achieved in this way, and gave her a small prayer card with Assunta's image printed on it. For nine days Rosa said the Our Father and Hail Mary prayers three times in addition to the prayer printed on the card, and the pain in her stomach stopped. A year later she wrote to the Missionaries of Mary to report her cure and had the letter signed by several relatives, a doctor, and a member of the local aristocracy (Loppinot Reference Loppinot1924, 72–4). There are many other stories of Assunta Pallotta's healing powers, but Micalina Kia and Rosa Bossi are typical in combining prayer to Assunta with other forms of medical treatment both Western and Chinese, and the use of sequences of simple prayers, relics placed on the injured part, and water in which fragments of the coffin had been boiled.Footnote ¹⁴

People came to the nuns to ask for scraps of Assunta Pallotta's clothing and later, her coffin, to work miracles. While the majority always sought healing, in the early years there were other requests as well: people went to Assunta's tomb to pray for rain, wore a crucifix she had once owned to overcome spiritual collapse, and won a deathbed repentance (Sinarum seu Tuscolana 1923, 233, 401–2, 421–22). All these events were publicized across the world through popular Franciscan journals and the personal networks of the Missionaries of Mary. Those who prayed to Assunta often promised that if she granted their request they would publicize the grace she had given them to her greater glory, something they did by writing to the Missionaries of Mary who then published the cases. Thus healings through her intercession were recorded from France, Tunisia, India, and Syria as well as across China and Italy. Alongside the healings she was given the credit for the conversion of a Buddhist nun in Ceylon, the establishment of a new convent of the Missionaries of Mary in Alexandria in Egypt, and relief from a plague of locusts in Tunisia (Sinarum seu Tuscolana 1923, 396–419; Loppinot Reference Loppinot1924, 69–75). Most of those requesting her aid simply said prayers to her as Rosa Bossi had done, but some people also wrote to the nuns in China asking for relics. An American woman recorded that she was saved from a violent nosebleed by a piece of Assunta's veil, which she had requested from the Taiyuan nuns. Another woman from Lafayette, Indiana, reported that a relic from Assunta's coffin combined with a set of prayers helped her brother who was in hospital with a bad foot (Franciscans in China 1925 (3)5: 92–3; 1926 (4)7: 119). People who asked for healing or other graces from Assunta Pallotta were participating in something that was by no means merely traditional, but part of a rapidly globalizing world where events in a remote part of China could become part of the life stories of people across the world.

Over time the types of requests made to Assunta Pallotta narrowed, and after the mid-1920s all the recorded cases concern physical healings. This reflected the demands of the beatification process. After the successful disinterment of Assunta's body, the head of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary had a meeting with Pope Pius X, who responded enthusiastically to the idea that simply to obey the rules of one's religious order was a form of sanctity (though he noted on the file afterwards that he was rather skeptical of so many miracles) and urged that the case for her beatification be pushed forward. Saint-making within the church was a bureaucratic, juridical process that had been strongly influenced by European ideas of science and emphasized rigorous testing of evidence (Duffin Reference Duffin2007). The first requirement was that the heroic virtue of the candidate for sainthood should be proved by written reports and if necessary, interviews with those who had known her. This process was successfully completed for Assunta Pallotta in 1932 (Federici Reference Federici1954, 201). In addition, the church required evidence for two miracles performed by prayer to the candidate for sainthood before beatification and another two before the candidate could be canonized as a saint of the whole church. The evidence for a miracle had to show that what occurred could not have been a result of the natural order and was therefore due to the prayers that were made to the candidate. The result of these rules has long been that the vast majority of miracles are healings and that there must be medical evidence that the patient would not have recovered naturally. This process had two obvious implications for the cult of Assunta Pallotta. The first was that the journals of the religious orders promoting her cult tended to emphasize healings rather than other kinds of miracles: prayers for rain at Assunta's tomb had ceased by the 1920s and the villagers went back to praying for rain at shrines to the Virgin Mary. The second implication was that healings that occurred in conjunction with the use of Western biomedicine would be more highly valued than others.

Like Micalina Kia and Rosa Bossi, most of those who recorded healings by Assunta Pallotta were women who sought her intercession as part of a desperate search for healing for themselves or their family members, a search that involved priests and relics but also doctors of both Chinese and Western medicine. When the two-year old son of a Taiyuan couple became ill with dysentery in 1919, his parents tried two different doctors of Chinese medicine and then Bianchieri, all to no avail. They then asked a priest to give the child the ritual of confirmation (which had indeed been given to Assunta Pallotta herself at a young age for similar reasons) and prepared a coffin. The priest provided a relic of Assunta and the mother laid it on the child, prayed to Assunta, and promised to pay for a solemn mass in her honor. The child recovered (Sinarum seu Tuscolana 1923, 430–1; Federici Reference Federici1954, 25). In another case, the mother of a five-year-old girl suffering from a large tumor on her neck (which led to her becoming blind from the swelling) took her into Taiyuan city, where she met up with a Virgin who was the child's aunt. Together they took the child to the nuns' clinic, then to a doctor of Chinese medicine suggested by one of the Chinese priests, then to the government hospital, and then to the Protestant hospital. They also tried invoking the supernatural help of the Boxer martyrs of 1900. When none of these was successful a missionary suggested prayer to Assunta and gave the child a medal with a stamp of Assunta's image, and the Virgin taught the little girl to say “Aunty Maria Assunta have mercy on me.” A few days later the mother happened to become angry with the child, and as the little girl wept in misery she said this prayer with great sincerity, whereupon the tumor receded and she suddenly realized that she could see a maize cob that she was being given to eat (Maestri Reference Maestri1923, 117–18). In these cases and others like them the range of medical treatments is emphasized, and the assessments of Chinese doctors are included alongside those of the doctors of Western medicine at the Protestant and government hospitals as part of the narrative that provides evidence for the miracle.

Because the healings worked through networks that linked people, especially women, to the nuns of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, the association with Saint Joseph's Hospital continued. The nuns who ran the hospital were naturally enthusiastic to promote the beatification process so they would suggest the use of relics of Assunta Pallotta to those they were otherwise unable to cure. A man who was diagnosed as having contracted tetanus after injuring his foot was given dust from her coffin mixed with water to drink in the hospital (Maestri Reference Maestri1923, 117–18). Again in 1925 a fifteen-year-old girl was brought in to the hospital after falling off a wall and concussing herself. As a result of the accident, eight months later she could no longer speak or recognize her family. The nuns decided that she was beyond human help and gave her a picture of Assunta Pallotta and a little piece of the coffin. The parents boiled the wood in water and gave it to the girl to drink while reciting a simple prayer to Assunta. After nine days of this treatment the girl recovered, and the father wrote to the nuns to record his gratitude and assure them that he would now fulfill the promise he had made to convert to Christianity (Maestri Reference Maestri1925).

As this last case suggests, the use of the relics in Taiyuan was not confined to Catholics. Indeed, as early as 1913, Marie Symphorien noted that pagans were also asking for graces with no less faith than that of the Christians (Loppinot Reference Loppinot1924, 62). The cult was part of a global Catholic experience, but it also fitted closely with local medical culture. Prayer and possibly physical contact with a relic were the methods of healing preferred by the church hierarchy, but they were not the only methods that European clergy would have been familiar with. Healing through ashes, relics, and holy water is characteristic of both European and Chinese traditions. In Europe the healing use of Ignatius-water and Xavier-water, which were made by immersing a relic of St. Ignatius or St. Francis Xavier in water and applying it internally or externally, was characteristic of the Jesuits (Johnson Reference Johnson, Scrivner and Johnson1996). In China Daoist priests had a long tradition of healing by writing a talisman, burning it, and mixing the ashes with water for the patient to drink. It was also common to pray to Lü Dongbin, a Daoist figure associated with medicine, and then draw one of the numbered lots kept on the altar of his temple which provided a prescription. In some temples the prescription would involve taking ashes from the temple's incense burner and consuming them. Moreover, many types of folk medicine were made by soaking objects in alcohol which was then drunk (Strickmann 2002, 9; Yang 2006, 190, 223; Liu Reference Dapeng1986, 181; Liu Reference Dapeng and Zhiqiang1990, 34).

After the early 1950s, when the European missionaries were expelled by the new communist government and the links with the outside world that had shaped the cult were largely broken, Assunta Pallotta's relics were almost entirely absorbed into this field of folk medicine and a single method came to dominate: the boiling of a small piece of Assunta's coffin in water which was then given to the patient to drink. At the same time, the relics were often used at the initiative of older men as with folk medicine rather than through the female networks of the Missionaries of Mary. A 1964 case shows a clear analogy between water in which Assunta's coffin had been soaked and folk medicines made in the same way. In this case the patient was a man who caught cold (shoufeng literally, “took the wind”) and developed a severe illness. He tried several doses of an unspecified medicine which had no effect before consuming alcohol in which tiger bones had been steeped. This had the unfortunate result of his getting a rash all over his body, spitting up black blood, and becoming so ill that the doctor said there was no hope of his surviving. The family wanted to take him to the hospital but were afraid that he would die on the way, so they gave him water in which a piece of Assunta's coffin had been boiled and prayed to her. After a prolonged crisis, he recovered. The recorded cases from this period imply that the coffin water acts directly on the body in a way that is functionally equivalent to these other types of medicine. Thus, a man whose ox was so ill that he thought he would have to slaughter it—a catastrophe for a poor farming family—instead boiled a piece of Assunta's coffin in water and fed the water to the ox, which then recovered (Yasongda 2005, 96–7).

Assunta Pallotta's body was dug up a second time during the Cultural Revolution, this time by Red Guards destroying the Catholic diocesan cemetery, thrown into a watercourse, and lost (Yasongda 2005, 105, 137). The Red Guards' actions, though more violent, were entirely in line with the ideas of the Communist government the time. Hostility to faith healing has been characteristic of Chinese communist policies towards religion, which often place faith healing alongside politically destabilizing millenarian doctrines as an example of the problems of religious belief. A dramatic example of this in Taiyuan in the 1960s was the case of a young Catholic man who was taken to a series of mass meetings to confess to having murdered his mother after she had made herself ill by drinking holy water. He claimed that the family had refused to seek medical treatment for her but instead beat her to death thinking they were exorcising a demon (Kongsu 1966; Zongjiao gongzuo tongxun 1965, 14). The records of the healings of Assunta Pallotta suggest that this story, and the stark contrast between scientific medicine and religion that underlies it, are misleading. The cult of Assunta Pallotta was constructed out of scientifically recorded evidence while the Western medicine provided by the missionaries was influenced by the needs of the cult. Moreover, those who sought healing did so in ways that were shaped both by European and Chinese traditions of folk medicine and often involved elite doctors of Chinese and Western medicine.

The Anniversary

In 2005 Taiyuan diocese organized a series of events to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the death of Assunta Pallotta. These included links with the Italian diocese where she was born, an exhibition in the building where she died using pictures sent from Hong Kong by the Missionaries of Mary, a reenactment of her story by local nuns, reprinting prayer cards, and the publication of a book. During the main ceremony there were public testimonies from a number of those she had healed (Yasongda 2005, 119, 127, 130, 145–47). In putting forward these public testimonies to healing, the diocese not only gave legitimacy to individual claims but also linked them to the global campaign for Assunta Pallotta's canonization, a process which has continued since her beatification in 1954 and was symbolized by an earlier visit of the bishop of her hometown in Italy. As they recreated earlier global links, these events brought Assunta's virtues back into sight and illustrated the continuities of people's search for healing through her.

Assunta's virtues of humility and obedience were much emphasized in these ceremonies and the various publications that accompanied them. As in her lifetime, these are virtues often personified by poor rural women and are inevitably problematic for them. A number of girls and women who had been given the Christian name Assunta in her honor (as has been quite common in the diocese ever since her death) were encouraged to write essays about what the name meant to them. On the whole these girls, like most other local Catholics, knew little about Assunta's life before the anniversary, having been named after her primarily because of her evident powers as a patron saint. One of them wrote, “I think, if it were me, then I definitely would not have wanted to do this kind of work in my hometown, then sail far across the ocean to China for the sake of spreading the gospel of the Lord's love, and still to do this very lowly job. How could it spread the gospel?” Of course, the essay continues, in this way Assunta teaches us that “we only need to obey (fucong), be humble, and do our own tasks and that is enough to become a saint” (Yasongda 2005, 110). Nevertheless, other people choose to live with these virtues as Assunta herself did: a group of village women have recently formed around the little chapel to her on the site of the building where she died to embrace her spirituality and try to carry it out in their daily lives.

Assunta also remains a source of powerful healing. With the loss of most relics during the Cultural Revolution, the method has changed to boiling a scrap of paper torn from a photograph of Assunta and drinking the water from that. The relic itself has been transformed through technology. In the earliest recorded case, which took place in 1974, it is said that the photograph had been taken when she was alive and preserved since then, but in the last few years, people have used the photographs distributed as prayer cards. An elderly nun who inherited a piece of Assunta's coffin instructed her niece, who lives with her and has inherited her job in the hospital, to make large numbers of reproductions of Assunta's image. Two recent cases of healing by drinking this photograph water occurred in 2001. One involved a woman who drank the water while she was convalescing from an operation ascribing to it her rapid recovery. The other case concerned a boy whose life-threatening illness the hospital was unable to diagnose. His family took him to the tomb of a priest who had been martyred in the Cultural Revolution and there had him drink water from Assunta's photograph (Yasongda 2005, 99–102). Today, as in the past, seeking the intercession of Assunta Pallotta is part of a search for healing that mixes prayer and folk medical techniques with biomedical practices.

The story of Assunta Pallotta clearly demonstrates the difficulties of a narrative in which Western missionaries bring modern biomedicine to China. This is not to say that members of the China Medical Missionary Association would have approved of the cult of Assunta Pallotta: as Protestants they would probably have been appalled and as self-conscious members of a modern intellectual elite they would have disapproved of the folk medicine aspects of the healings. However, this does not mean that the Catholic missionaries were lowering the standards of Western medicine for the sake of conversions, since the vast majority of healings recorded were to families who were already committed believers. Moreover, it is undoubtedly true that some people recovered from illnesses that had troubled and frightened them, though the reasons for their recovery are always open to debate even from the perspective of the church: only two of Assunta Pallotta's many healings were ever officially recognized by the Catholic church as miracles and both of these took place in Italy. The very fact that the church insists on biomedical cooperation to recognize miracles makes it unlikely that such miracles could come from rural China. Instead, when we move from the predominantly male world of Western biomedicine and classical Chinese medicine to a world in which women pursue healing for themselves and their family members through networks that bring folk medicine and divine healing alongside the practices of the medical professionals, we see that science and religion are not separate and distinct alternatives but part of a complex of ideas about how the world works and that they interact with and shape each other over the course of history. Both Europe and China had ideas about the power of saints and traditions of folk medicine that are similar but neither derivative nor obviously connected. Thus, what we see in the story of Assunta Pallotta and her cult is not the transmission of Western medicine to China but a process through which in both Europe and China the search for healing is shaped in processes that interact not only with local traditions but which also reach across the globe.