Popular retellings of incorrupt-saint stories often flatten a documented, gradual and partial preservation into a claim of literal freshness, unchanged since the day of death. The Bernadette record does not support that stronger claim: the examining physician's own 1925 language, mummified, mildewed, salted, describes real and visible change, and the wax mask exists specifically because church authorities judged the actual, unaltered appearance unsuited to devotional display. What was preserved was preservation beyond ordinary expectation for an unembalmed burial, not an absence of change.
Conservators and scientists who study such cases generally point to ordinary taphonomic factors, a dry burial environment, a well-sealed coffin, and the chemistry of the surrounding soil, as sufficient on their own to explain many documented instances of unusual preservation, without requiring anything beyond natural process. The historian Ruth Harris's study of Lourdes situates the display of Bernadette's body within the shrine's wider devotional and promotional culture, alongside its medical bureau and its pilgrimage economy, rather than treating it as a claim standing apart from that context. The Catholic Church's own canonization process, notably, does not require incorruption and has canonized many saints whose remains show ordinary decomposition.