Why Alexis Carrel, later Nobel laureate, left France for the United States: A reappraisal.

The life of Alexis Carrel, recipient of the 1912 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, is closely linked to Lourdes and the religious tensions that marked twentieth-century France. In 1902, he traveled to Lourdes. Upon his return, his account of the cure of Marie Bailly-a twenty-three-year-old woman suffering from peritonitis according to several physicians-caused a scandal in French academic circles. His Chief of Surgery subsequently dismissed him. In 1904, he went into exile in Canada, then the United States, where he established connections with Charles Claude Guthrie, Hervey Cushing and Simon Flexner, who welcomed him to the Rockefeller Institute. Over the years, Carrel lost all contact with Marie Bailly. Decades later, in the 1930s and again in the 1960s, attempts to reopen her medical records met with limited success. Was it a case of tubercular peritonitis or pseudoperitonitis? A misinterpretation-or an exceptional recovery? This article reexamines the case of Marie Bailly based on unpublished documents from the Sanctuary of Lourdes Archives, including Carrel's original notes.