I know not what this attack may result in, but one thing I pray, that it may be the divine will that I am not to languish out months on a sick bed; nevertheless, “not my will but Thine be done.”140
A few days later, after sending him a note in the morning, she wrote him at greater length in the afternoon or evening:
I regret this morning having written you I was sick. I am vastly better, and fear you are still anxious and perhaps will make quite a sacrifice in coming to see me. But this I told you not to do. I hope you will have more caution than I had, and wait till you receive this. Still, if I were as sick now as when I wrote you, I should think such, a very cool proceeding.141
In the letter she had written him a few days earlier she had mentioned that she had no physician except “a call from cousin Willie Chamberlain who is at home now to see his Mother,” but she had little confidence in him as he was a mere boy.142 Abigail Tilton had a violent prejudice against Dr. Ladd, whom she accused of neglecting her mother during her last illness, and this may explain his not being called in.143
In the same letter Mrs. Glover mentioned that she had had to take morphine, “which I so much disapprove,” as the only relief from her pain. The doctors of the day prescribed this drug freely without a thought of the possible consequences. Evidently Mrs. Glover’s reluctance to use it caused her to abandon it almost immediately.144 By the time ● ● ●
143 Sarah Clement Kimball, recorded in Ruth W. Wardwell to The Christian Science Board of Directors, 1 February 1920, Reminiscence, p. 5, MBEL.
↑144 [Mary Baker Glover to Daniel Patterson, 29 April 1853, L08900, MBEL.] In a determined effort to prove a lifelong “morphine habit,” [Dittemore] quoted Mrs. Hannah Philbrook who, along with Mrs. Mary Whittier, was the source of all the most sensational charges against Mrs. Glover during the Sanbornton years. [Publisher’s note: The first edition credits Milmine, not Dittemore.] The animus of these two ladies and the proved unreliability of several of their more remarkable charges invite a certain skepticism. In this case, such evidence as is available points to exactly the opposite conclusion from the Philbrook charge. See p. 265, including note 6.
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