Mary Baker Eddy: Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures

About the Author

Born on July 16, 1821, in Bow, New Hampshire, a rural town near the state capital of Concord, Mary Morse Baker was the sixth and youngest child of strict Congregationalist parents. Early on, she showed an enthusiasm for religion and literature, writing poems. As a youth, she reportedly suffered from a variety of maladies, including dyspepsia (indigestion or stomach troubles), ulcers, neuralgia, and spinal problems.

Her early adulthood was unsettled. She married her first husband, George Glover, a builder from South Carolina, at the age of twenty-two. Glover died less than a year after the couple relocated to the South, leaving his pregnant wife to make her way back to New Hampshire. After the birth of her son, George Washington Glover II, Mary Glover taught for a time at a primary school, but after the death of her mother, she spent months traveling from relative to relative, feeling that she and her son were unwelcome in her newly remarried father’s home. In 1851 her son was sent to live with former servants of the family and would not see his mother again for twenty-three years. Mary Glover married again in 1853, to a dentist, Daniel Patterson, but her life continued to be plagued by poor health and worries about money. Her husband, serving with the Union forces, was captured by the Confederates in 1862; that same year, Mary Patterson sought treatment at a hydropathic institute for a variety of complaints. When the water cure was unavailing, she traveled to Maine to visit a mesmeric healer, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. The original mesmerists—including Franz Anton Mesmer, the eighteenth-century German physician for whom the technique was named—used actual magnets to conduct what they took to be healing “energy” through their patients’ bodies. Quimby, on the other hand, used the magnetic force of his own hands, often dipping them in “magnetized” water—perhaps weakly acidulated—before rubbing or manipulating the affected limb or body part of his patient.

Rallying, she would spend much of that year and the next in Quimby’s care, conferring with him in detail about his methods of mesmerism, spiritualism, and laying-on of hands, which subsequently played a role in formulating her own theories on healing. In an 1862 letter to a Portland newspaper, she called his discoveries “a science capable of demonstration.” The following year, in an unpublished manuscript, Quimby coined the term Christian Science, and Mrs. Patterson and the doctor continued to confer by letter. She wrote often about Quimby’s teachings and healing practice, until his death on January 16, 1866.

On February 1, 1866, two weeks after her mentor’s death, Mrs. Patterson fell on the ice in Lynn, Massachusetts, while on her way to a temperance meeting. There has been much subsequent debate over the nature and extent of her injuries. A local newspaper at the time described her injuries as serious, as did a homeopathic physician. After suffering in bed for several days, according to her later account, she experienced an instantaneous healing after reading one of the biblical healings of Jesus. The incident became known among her followers as “the Fall in Lynn,” and was considered the breakthrough that resulted in her discovery of Christian Science. Shortly thereafter, deserted by her second husband, Mrs. Patterson began a period of itinerant life, staying in New England rooming houses. In 1872 she began to write a manuscript based on her discussions of healing with Quimby. The first edition of the textbook, called Science and Health, was published in 1875, privately printed with donations from a handful of students.

In 1877, after receiving a divorce from Patterson, she married Gilbert Eddy, one of her devoted students. The marriage lasted until his death in 1882. The remaining decades of Mary Baker Eddy’s life were spent revising her textbook, teaching the precepts of Christian Science to successive waves of students, and establishing institutions devoted to the religion, including the Mother Church. Mocked by Mark Twain and plagued by lawsuits, sensational attacks in the press, and scandals involving disgruntled students, her later years were tumultuous. Eddy’s disgust with the yellow journalism of the day, particularly the coverage in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, inspired her to create a daily newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor, in 1908. She died two years later.