Amanda Smith's Healing of Her Son Alma — Miraculous Recovery at Haun's Mill (1838)

On October 30, 1838, a Missouri mob attacked the Latter-day Saint settlement at Haun's Mill, killing seventeen men and boys in one of the bloodiest massacres in early Church history. Among the wounded was Alma Smith, the seven-year-old son of Amanda Smith, whose entire hipbone had been shot away by gunfire.

Amanda Smith recounted the horror: "Flesh, hip bone, joint and all had been ploughed out. ... We laid little Alma on a bed in our tent and I examined the wound. It was a ghastly sight. I knew not what to do."

Alone with her dead husband and wounded child, with no doctor available, Amanda knelt in prayer. She wrote: "'Oh my Heavenly Father,' I cried, 'what shall I do? Thou seest my poor wounded boy and knowest my inexperience. Oh, Heavenly Father, direct me what to do!' And then I was directed as by a voice speaking to me."

What followed was a series of divinely inspired medical treatments that were extraordinary for 1838 and remain medically remarkable today:

1. She was guided to use ashes from the smoldering fire to make lye, saturating cloths and packing them into the wound to cleanse it. With each application, "mashed flesh and splinters of bone came away with the cloth; and the wound became as white as chicken's flesh."

2. She was then instructed to locate a nearby slippery-elm tree and make a poultice from it to fill the wound.

3. She was reminded of a bottle of balsam in her husband's trunk, which she poured into the wound to soothe Alma's pain.

4. She had Alma lay face-down for five weeks while she cared for the wound, telling him: "Now you lay like that, and don't move, and the Lord will make you another hip."

After five weeks, the boy was entirely recovered. A flexible gristle had grown in place of the missing hip joint and socket. Elder James E. Faust, who shared this account at General Conference in 2000, noted: "A flexible gristle having grown in place of the missing joint and socket, which remains to this day a marvel to physicians."

Alma Smith never suffered any crippling effects from the injury. In fact, he later served as a missionary and lived a full, active life. Nearly forty years after the incident, when Elder Faust shared the account, Alma was still living and remained a "living miracle of the power of God."

The healing combined prayer, faith, divine guidance, and Amanda Smith's willingness to act on spiritual promptings in the absence of modern medical knowledge—resulting in a recovery that defied the medical understanding of her time and remains medically anomalous today.