Joseph Smith's Childhood Typhoid Fever Healing

At age eight, Joseph Smith suffered from typhoid fever, which caused a severe fever sore between his breast and shoulder. He endured agonizing pain for two weeks before the sore was lanced. The pain then moved to his leg, causing further agony for several weeks. He was eventually healed through the power of God in answer to his parents' prayers and faith.

In his own 1838–1839 historical dictation, Joseph Smith recorded that while he was living in New Hampshire, he was treated by Drs. Smith, Stone, and Perkins of Hanover. He specifically recalled that when the abscess formed, Dr. Parker identified it as a sprained shoulder and attempted to treat it with 'bone ointment' and the application of a 'hot shovel' before it was lanced and drained. Joseph further noted that when the infection moved to his leg, eleven doctors from Dartmouth Medical College visited him to propose amputation, an operation he 'utterly refused,' instead consenting to an experimental procedure to remove a large portion of the infected bone. Following the surgery, fourteen additional bone fragments worked their way out of his leg as it healed.

Modern medical corroboration: A 2015 Dartmouth College feature honoring the operation confirms that the surgery was performed by Dr. Nathan Smith, founder of Dartmouth Medical School (established 1797), who drilled out pieces of diseased bone from the boy's infected left leg without anesthesia or antiseptic techniques — a procedure he pioneered that was not widely adopted until World War I. Dartmouth's account records that although Joseph used a crutch for three years and limped thereafter, the leg healed well and supported him for the rest of his life. Dr. LeRoy Wirthlin, a retired vascular surgeon who researched and wrote about the case, judged that “even today that would still be considered a very successful result.” In 2015, on the 200th anniversary of the surgery, the Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith Family Association presented Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine with a $25,000 gift creating the Joseph Smith’s Miracle Surgery Scholarship for medical students, with family representative Daniel Adams declaring, “We have always been grateful to Dr. Nathan Smith for the miraculous surgery.” M. Russell Ballard, then co-chairman of the association’s board of trustees, added that the family was pleased to make the donation “in Dr. Nathan Smith’s honor.”