Fanny Stenhouse — A Former Member Who Left the Church — Testified She Witnessed Joseph Smith Heal a Bedridden Woman

Among the most remarkable testimonies to the healing power of Joseph Smith comes not from a faithful Latter-day Saint, but from a woman who eventually apostatized from the Church and wrote one of its most famous critical exposés.

Fanny Stenhouse joined the Church as a young woman in England and eventually emigrated to Utah. After years of disillusionment — particularly over the practice of polygamy — she left the Church and wrote 'Tell It All': The Story of a Life's Experience in Mormonism (1874), a deeply critical and widely-read account of Mormon life.

Yet in that very book, on pages 74–87, Stenhouse recorded an account she could not explain away: she had personally witnessed Joseph Smith miraculously heal an old woman who had been bedridden and unable to walk for years.

Stenhouse was present when Smith came, laid his hands on the woman, and commanded her to be healed. The woman rose from her bed, stood, and walked.

Strikingly, Stenhouse — who by the time of writing was actively working against the Church — did not dismiss the healing as a trick or a fraud. She explicitly avowed it was not a fake. Instead, she attributed it to an unexplained, possibly occultic power — anything other than the God she no longer believed Joseph Smith represented.

The account stands as a remarkable piece of evidence: a hostile witness, writing in an adversarial text, who could not bring herself to deny what she had seen with her own eyes — a man she had come to distrust, healing a woman no medicine had healed.