“We were governed by the best light we had,” Brown would later write to Craik. “We thought we were right; and so we were justified.”4 And by the medical standards of the day, and the information available to them, they were. But everything Craik, Brown, and Dick did made Washington’s condition worse. Around 4:30 p.m., Washington asked Lear to get Martha, who preferred to wait in another room. He sent her to his study to get the wills. (He had two: The earlier one, possibly dated around June 1775, had been drawn by a lawyer friend; the other was more recent.5) As he neared death, Washington was
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