Saint Lydwine of Schiedam

A fall on the ice that never healed

Lydwine was born on April 18, 1380, in the Dutch town of Schiedam, one of nine children born to a laborer father — an ordinary, unremarkable start for a life that would become anything but ordinary. At fifteen, out ice skating with friends the way any teenager in that part of Holland might have been, she fell and broke a rib. It should have been a routine injury, the kind that heals in weeks. It wasn't. Lydwine never recovered.

What followed instead was a slow, cascading decline that modern readers might reasonably find hard to picture happening to a single teenager. Walking became difficult, then painful, then close to impossible. Headaches set in, along with violent tooth pain. By the time she was nineteen, just four years after the accident, both of her legs were paralyzed and her vision had begun to fail. Her condition continued to deteriorate over the following decades, with what accounts describe as occasional periods of partial remission, until her death in 1433 at the age of 52 — thirty-seven years after the fall that started it all.

A modern medical guess, not a medieval diagnosis

Modern medical historians looking back at Lydwine's documented symptoms — the age at which her illness began, the sheer length of time it lasted, and the particular pattern of its progression, including periods of apparent remission followed by relapse — have noted real similarities to multiple sclerosis. It's worth being direct about what that observation is and isn't. It's retrospective speculation by researchers working centuries after Lydwine's death, applying a modern diagnostic category that simply didn't exist in the 15th century, to symptoms recorded by people who had no framework for understanding what was happening to her. It's an informed, interesting guess — not a contemporary diagnosis, and not something that should be presented as settled medical fact.

Fame as a suffering holy woman

As her condition worsened, Lydwine's reputation grew rather than faded. Tradition holds that after her accident she began an extended, continuous fast, and that she became known across the region as a healer and holy woman whose suffering itself seemed to carry spiritual weight — pilgrims reportedly traveled to see her, seeking her prayers and her presence at her own sickbed. Later accounts also credit her with mystical visions experienced during the depths of her long illness. None of this rests on independently verified contemporary documentation in the way a modern historian would want; it belongs to the category of pious tradition built up around a genuinely suffering woman, not confirmed biographical fact. That distinction doesn't erase the devotion that grew around her — it just means the specific claims of extended fasting and visionary experience should be read as tradition, not as established history.

A pilgrimage site, and recognition centuries later

When Lydwine died in 1433, her grave in Schiedam quickly became a site of pilgrimage, carrying forward the same devotion that had drawn visitors to her sickbed while she was still alive. Formal Church recognition came much later: Pope Leo XIII officially recognized her sanctity in 1890, confirming centuries of popular veneration with papal authority.

Patron of the sport that broke her

Lydwine's patronages read, more than most saints', like a direct response to her own biography. She's honored as patroness of her hometown, Schiedam, and — with obvious relevance — as patroness of people suffering chronic pain and long-term illness, a designation that needs no explanation given the thirty-seven years she spent living with exactly that. But it's her modern patronage as protector of ice skating and ice skaters that carries the sharpest, almost poetic irony: centuries after a single fall on the ice ended her health as she'd known it, the Church named her guardian of the very sport that caused it. Her feast is kept on April 14.