The following Friday, which was in the month of August, and for five succeeding Fridays she had a profuse bloody perspiration, the disorder disappearing on Friday, March 8th, of the following year.

Pooley says that Maldonato, in his "Commentaries of Four Gospels," mentions a healthy and robust man who on hearing of his sentence of death sweated blood, and Zacchias noted a similar phenomenon in a young man condemned to the flames.

Allusion may also be made to St.Luke, who said of Christ that in agony He prayed more earnestly, "and His sweat was, as it were, great drops of blood falling down to the ground." Pooley quotes the case of a young woman of indolent habit who in a religious fanatical trance sweated blood.

The stigmatists were often imposters who artificially opened their scars, and set the example for the really peculiar cases of bloody sweat, which among ignorant people was considered evidence of sympathy with the agony of the Cross.
Probably the best studied case on record is that of Louise Lateau of Bois d'Haine, which, according to Gray, occurred in 1869 in a village of Belgium when the girl was at the age of twenty-three; her previous life had offered nothing remarkable.

The account is as follows: "One Friday Louise Lateau noticed that blood was flowing from one side of her chest, and this recurred every Friday.