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

Context

From the 1820s to the 1860s, a wave of evangelical, millennialist fervor swept across the country, known in American religious history as the Second Great Awakening, an attempt to restore what was seen as a more primitive, authentic Christianity. (The first awakening had taken place a century earlier, when revivals sprang up in New England in the 1730s, culminating in Jonathan Edwards’s famous 1741 sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”). Born in New Hampshire in 1821, the young Mary Baker was exposed to this reformist movement, dubbed a “shopkeeper’s millennium” because farmers and other working people made up the majority of participants. Baker is known to have attended a week-long revival meeting in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1834, at the age of twelve and was probably aware of a number of famous religious breakaway sects that came out of the northeast corner of the United States. Such movements would have included the Millerite movement—led by William Miller in a region of western New York State referred to as the “burned-over district” for its thorough exposure to evangelical zeal—which ultimately gave rise to Seventh-Day Adventism. As a youth, she may also have heard of the church launched by Joseph Smith in 1830 in western New York with the publication of the Book of Mormon. Dramatic accounts of faith healings were commonplace during the period and may have been influential in the formation of Eddy’s beliefs.

The nineteenth century was also an age of social reform. Abolition, the campaign for women’s suffrage, and the temperance movement galvanized American life, and there are references to reform in Science and Health. But the most important historical context shaping the book concerns the extraordinary experimentation in dietary and other health regimens, resulting in a welter of treatments. Phrenology (the association of skull conformation with brain function), hydropathy (the “water cure”), and electrotherapy became enormously popular, as did cures based on exposure to cold, light, heat, or magnets. Hypnotists performed demonstrations on crowds eager to experience the unknown powers of the mind. Health fads often sprang from or were combined with religious belief: The Battle Creek Sanitarium, opened in 1866 in Battle Creek, Michigan, by the brothers Kellogg, was inspired by the dietary and health teachings of the Seventh-Day Adventists.

The therapy that directly influenced Science and Health was that of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, a self-taught mesmerist who traveled and lectured during the 1840. Quimby was known for performing mesmeric healings with a partner, Lucius Burkmar, who would diagnose and prescribe treatments for patients while under hypnosis. Eventually, Quimby believed that his partner had cured him of a potentially fatal illness, identifying the curative agent as something akin to the power of suggestion. In 1862, Quimby acquired Eddy (then Mrs. Mary Patterson) as a patient. She had suffered for years from a number of seemingly intractable ailments. Fresh from a failed hydropathic treatment in New Hampshire, Eddy consulted Quimby at his office in Portland, Maine, and their discussions of mental healing would prove profoundly important in Eddy’s subsequent thinking and writing. While placing her teachings within the Christian tradition, Eddy felt free to build on that tradition, suggesting that her healing revelations amounted to a rediscovery of the techniques practiced by Jesus. Eventually, as her own teachings grew popular, former students of Quimby and Eddy herself broke away to establish their own sects. Collectively, the breakaway groups, including the Unity School of Christianity and Divine Science, became known as the New Thought movement.

Another influence on Science and Health was transcendentalism, a literary and religious movement that emphasized self-reliance and the power of the individual mind to transcend the physical realm. The American transcendentalists—including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Amos Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller—rejected Enlightenment rationalism in favor of romantic and mystical thought. They were influenced by Vedic philosophy from India counseling an attitude of detachment or serenity, positing an immortal soul capable of sloughing off the physical body for existence on a higher plane. These elements all appear in Science and Health in radically simplified and altered ways.