Mormon healing: Call the elders — or the sisters?

Mormon healing: Call the elders — or the sisters?
Published on May 10, 2011

For much of the first 100 years of LDS history, Mormon women could lay their hands on the sick, anoint them with oil, and offer a blessing for their recovery. They felt a special obligation to bless their own children and other mothers during pregnancy “confinement” and childbirth. That all ended in the mid-20th century, when the practice became the exclusive realm of the men-only Mormon priesthood.

Female healing first was authorized by church founder Joseph Smith, then carried on under Brigham Young and other early LDS presidents, according to an article in the winter issue of the Journal of Mormon History by Jonathan Stapley and Kristine Wright.

At an April 1844 Nauvoo General Conference, the authors note that Young declared, “I want a wife that can take care of my chi[ldre]n when I am away — who can pray — lay on hands anoint with oil & baffle the enemy.”

Young was such an advocate of female healing, Stapley and Wright argue, that in 1869 he chastized women who were seeking blessings from men, saying: “Why do you not live so as to rebuke disease? It is your privilege to do so without sending for the elders. ... ”

The ritual continued to be practiced while it was passed on through oral tradition, without manuals or written instructions. But when the Utah-based church began to formalize its institutional teachings and practices regarding priesthood powers in the early 20th century, the practice slowly evolved away from the women.

In a 1940 pamphlet, apostle John A. Widtsoe taught that “the spiritual gifts which always accompany the church of Christ and are signs of its verity, are properly exercised under the power of the priesthood.”

After that, women could pray for the health of their children and family, but only men could perform healing ordinances.

Stapley and Wright do note, however, an intriguing exception from 1979.

Then-President Spencer W. Kimball was recovering from brain surgery and asked for a blessing. Bruce R. McConkie, an apostle, and Marion D. Hanks, a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy, arrived to give it to him. Hanks anointed the ailing prophet's head, while McConkie invited Kimball's son, Edward, to join in. The apostle also invited the prophet's wife, Camilla, to place her hands on her husband's head.

“That was unusual,” Edward Kimball later wrote. “It seemed right to me, but I would not have felt free to suggest it on my own because of an ingrained sense that the ordinance is a priesthood ordinance.”

Though the LDS Church no longer authorizes women to administer healing rituals, Stapley and Wright conclude, “the heritage of female healing in the LDS Church is an essential facet of Mormon history and testament to the faith, power, and community of Mormon women.”