No. 8 Broad Street
It was plain to be seen that Mrs. Godfrey of Chelsea, Massachusetts, was a descendant of Yankee sea captains who had stoutly held to their course through hurricane, blizzard, and typhoon.
Accidentally running a needle deep into her finger, she found herself with an increasingly painful infection. It could, the doctors warned her, lead to the loss of her entire arm unless she allowed them to amputate her finger. But the daughter of mariners who had braved the roaring seas around Cape Horn stood firm. Matter-of-factly she wrapped the hugely swollen finger in a homemade bandage, tried to stop the “putrifaction” by applications of tar, bore the pain with stoic resignation, and carried on with her housework.1
In the midst of this septic crisis an SOS arrived from Mrs. Godfrey’s favorite nephew, William Nash, foreman in a shoe factory in the nearby city of Lynn. His wife was ill; he needed help, and Mrs. Godfrey rallied to the challenge. Disregarding her finger and bundling her seven-year-old daughter along with her, she hurried off to her nephew’s home.
1 Mary Godfrey Parker, “Reminiscences of Mrs. Mary Godfrey Parker,” 13 December 1932, Reminiscence, pp. 4–5, Mary Baker Eddy Library, Boston, Massachusetts (hereafter MBEL). The details and quotations throughout this section are drawn from a circumstantial account written by Mrs. Godfrey’s daughter. Mrs. Parker states that her mother consulted not one but several doctors in regard to her infected finger.