In April 1962 Vittorio Micheli, a young soldier in the Italian army, developed worsening pain in his left hip. X-rays showed osteolysis, the destruction of bone tissue, involving the ilium and the socket of the hip joint, and a biopsy of the surrounding muscle found cells of a sarcomatous, malignant character. Given the extent of the disease and the medical options available at the time, doctors did not consider him a candidate for surgery, and he received neither radiotherapy nor chemotherapy.
Unable to walk and in severe pain, Micheli traveled to Lourdes on a stretcher in May 1963 as part of an organized pilgrimage of the sick. Following his visit to the shrine's baths, he reported a rapid lessening of pain and, over the following weeks, a return of movement in the affected leg. Subsequent x-rays showed new bone forming in the area the tumor had destroyed, and within a period of months doctors described the hip as substantially reconstituted, a course of recovery without precedent in the medical literature on this type of sarcoma. Micheli continued to serve afterward and lived for decades following his recovery, returning to Lourdes on later pilgrimages himself; his case file, including the original 1962 biopsy and x-ray records, was preserved in full for the medical committee's later review, a completeness that set it apart from many earlier and less well documented claimed cures at the shrine.