The Healing of Paulus and Palladia at Hippo (Augustine, City of God 22.8)

Among all the miracles Augustine catalogues in City of God Book 22, the case of Paulus and Palladia is the most personally attested. Seven siblings from Cappadocia suffered from debilitating convulsions — a condition their family attributed to a curse laid by their mother after a dispute over inheritance. Two of them, the brother Paulus and his sister Palladia, came to Hippo in hopes of relief at the shrine of St. Stephen the Protomartyr, whose relics had arrived in North Africa in 416 CE.

Paulus had been in Hippo for two weeks, attending daily at the shrine and praying there constantly, when on Easter morning c. 425 CE, during the service at which Augustine was presiding, Paulus fell prostrate at the altar railing. He rose healed, no longer shaking. Augustine, who knew Paulus by sight and was present, describes the congregation's spontaneous weeping and shouting. He ordered Paulus to give an account, and later collected a formal written deposition read publicly to the congregation.

Ten days later, Palladia came to the shrine. She prayed at the altar, rubbed her eyes with a cloth that had touched the relic, and her own convulsions ceased. Augustine collected her deposition as well. He notes with care that both healings were publicly witnessed by large numbers of people in the presence of the relics.

The documentation is exceptional for late antiquity. Yet those conditions are precisely those most likely to trigger spontaneous remission of functional neurological disorders. Conversion disorder (formerly "hysterical" convulsions) is well documented in modern literature and can produce severe, chronic, and then suddenly resolving symptoms that are real, not fabricated, but neurogenic rather than organic in origin.