The Websters still sought recovery, turning both to physicians and to prayer.
Neither worked.
Wealthy’s stomach and lungs “commenced paining her” so badly that her siblings soaked cloths in smartweed, a “hot herb” recommended as an antidote for “cold swelling.” Celestia had to take a break, sleeping in a different room. Despite the smartweed, Wealthy’s “countenance looks decidedly worse today and she has been suffering acute pain.”
Wealthy reported that the abdominal pain was killing her, “that she cannot see what she has done that she should suffer so.” She asked Sue to pray for her recovery. Celestia took another break. Unable to sleep, Celestia immersed herself in the physically taxing labor of laundry.
Celestia returned to Wealthy’s bedside, tending her sister through “gripping pains through her stomach and bowels.” Celestia and Libbie, another sister, applied smartweed again, but the herb “was too heavy for her.” The Websters called in more physicians, bringing both Dr. Joel Hulbert, who lived nearest, and Dr. Charles Brown from two towns away. Alas, “neither of them thought she would get well.”
Wealthy endured six more “bad day[s]” of pain, vomiting, diarrhea, and exhaustion. Her sisters tended to Wealthy and to each other. One night, seventeen-year-old Carrie woke Celestia; Carrie was “having a hard time of it,” and asked Celestia to relieve her. Celestia prayed, “Oh my God, give me faith and restore my sister to health I beseech of thee.”
On October 9th, the doctor left morphine powders for the first time. Even with this strong pain relief, Wealthy “suffered much.” Finally, on October 11th, “Sue came down and said…that Wet was dying.” The family gathered around Wealthy, who “spit up quantities of putrid matter.” She gave away more of her things; “she said she was resigned to the will of God;” she “breathed her last” at 6:30 that evening. Celestia noted that Wealthy “didn’t appear to suffer as much when dying as she had at other times. Oh! What a sad sad time we are having.”
***
TL;DR? That’s the point. Illness and death absorb time and emotion. You may have skipped ahead; Celestia and Wealthy could not. Unable to reduce Wealthy’s fevers or arrest her diarrhea or help her breathe or calm her stomach, her family and physicians watched Wealthy suffer for three long months. The Websters and physicians did everything possible. Wealthy probably died from tuberculosis, the deadliest disease of the nineteenth century. Had she fallen ill a century later, after Koch’s 1880s discovery of the tubercle bacillus ushered in germ theory and led to the twentieth-century development of effective antibiotics for tuberculosis, the Websters would have saved their sister. RFK Jr. calls vaccines and antibiotics “patented poisons,” but these are the cures for which Celestia and countless others prayed.