Caroline Angell Holbrook Healed After Seven Sisters Washed and Anointed Her with Oil (Salt Lake City, c. 1852)

Caroline Frances Angell Holbrook (1825-1908), sister of Brigham Young's wife Mary Ann Angell Young, had been left by her first husband at Winter Quarters and crossed the plains in Brigham Young's 1848 company with her children and mother. Some years after arriving in the Salt Lake Valley, at twenty-seven years of age, she was taken gravely ill. "Many thought my time had come to go; I thought I would not." Following the New Testament pattern of calling for the elders to anoint the sick, she asked for seven sisters to come and wash and anoint her with oil, as practiced by the Latter-day Saint women in that era. The sisters found her feet "as cold as though I was dead" — yet she testifies, "I began to mend from that very hour and got well," and she lived more than fifty years afterward, dying in Bountiful, Utah, in 1908.

Fuller account of this event (the complete account as preserved in A Sketch of the Life and Experiences of Caroline Frances Angell Holbrook, autobiography):

When I was twenty seven years old, I was taken very sick. Many thought my time had come to go; I thought I would not. I asked for seven sisters to come and wash and anoint me with oil; this was done. I began to mend from that very hour and got well. The sisters said my feet were as cold as though I was dead. I have lived over fifty years since.