We have all heard the story of Joseph Smith around the age of 9 having a serious leg infection & abscess as a result of having typhoid fever. The story goes that he refused to have any alcohol for the pain and told the doctors to proceed with the surgery without any pain medicine.

I continue to hear TBM's say that Joseph didn't partake of any pain medication because he refused the alcohol. On the other hand, I think it is very likely that the doctors that operated on him may have used opium or opium containing medicine to help with his pain. Opium was common and easily obtained in the early 1800's and was a major import to the United States. It was used for many conditions, including as an anti-depressant.

Joseph most likely suffered from pain in that leg on & off his whole life. I seriously think opium may have played a more important role in Joseph's life then we ever thought..

http://www.discoveriesinmedicine.com/Ni-Ra/Opium.html#b

My money is on ether but who knows. That lying piece of $hit probably never had leg surgery in the first place.

JS was a sex addict and serial masturbator. He had such a severe addiction to self-pleasure that he forbade it in his church and went after his friend's daughters to get off.

This is true. If you disagree you are a biot!~

Ether wasn't used as an anesthetic until the 1840s.

^Bingo^

The Joy plant could possibly have helped Joseph "translate" the golden plates. It certainly helped Thomas de Quincey.
http://opioids.com/red.html

I guess he developed his alcohol habits later:

http://www.mormonismi.net/jamesdavid/postin13.htm

Good find!

I don't see any reason to suspect such a blatant lie from Lucy's handwritten biography. She got so many other aspects of the fraud right.

There's a possibility that a nine year old Joseph wouldn't want anything to do with "Daddy's Angry Juice."

I agree. I knew a nine year old girl who's parents were both alcoholics. She was essentially terrified of alcohol and had very little real understanding of it at that age. She just knew that it made people do awful things. I could easily see a kid that age with an alcoholic dad having a gut "No!" reaction at being offered alcohol.
An opioid seems likely.

Let's exhume him again and see what his leg bone looks like.

yeah, i'm bored this afternoon......

No, let's just get the RLDS church to release the photographs of his full skeleton they took in 1928.

I had wrongly assumed (I guess) the abscess (osteomyletis) was in his femur but according to a more recent article I read it was his tibia.So now I am not really sure.

And then Joseph's hair clippings..........well you know what we can measure with those....

.....Sorry, but Wednesday nights are my criminal mind and CSI nights:)

I bet he would have asked for painkiller, had the supposed "anti-Mormon mob" followed through with their plan to castrate him. Luckily he was only tarred and feathered.

Mormon folklore states unequivocally that Joseph took an 80 mg tablet of baby aspirin following the incident.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/05/2013 09:30PM by senoritalamanita.

I have always hated that bullshit faith promoting story about joey refusing a drink before surgery on moral grounds. Every damn TBM in the country, even the big 15, gets anesthesia when they go in for surgery and super powerful pain meds in recovery. Every one of those drugs makes a shot of whiskey look like milk.

We've all seen cowboy movies where the hero takes a swig of whiskey and bites on a leather strap or something while the doc digs a bullet out of him. . .but seriously, especially from the doctor's point of view, how are you going to keep a little kid - even one with exceptional self-control - from wiggling, even involuntarily, during a terribly painful surgical procedure?

Any parent can tell you, it's not easy to remove a deeply embedded splinter from a little kid's foot unless you have at least a couple of grown-ups to hold the kid still. Better to go to the ER and let them numb it, if possible.

It's too easy for the knife-wielder to make a mistake if the patient is moving - and with a little kid, it would be all but impossible to keep the kid still.

They would tie off the limb, restricting blood flow, causing it to fall asleep.

Then they hit you with the opiates and what not so you don't go into shock.

I read this on the intertubes so it has to be true.