Christian Science grew out of a New England mesmerist's treatment room
Mary Baker Eddy spent decades in poor health, lost a husband, her mother and a fiancé within a few years, and gave up her son. After sessions with the mesmerist Phineas Quimby and a fall on ice in 1866, she built Christian Science, its Boston Mother Church and, in 1908, the Christian Science Monitor.
The youngest of six children, Mary Morse Baker arrived on July 16, 1821, on the family farm at Bow, New Hampshire. Her father, Mark, was a quarrelsome Calvinist, a neighbour recalled as having a tiger's temper, and a pro-slavery Copperhead during the Civil War; her mother was remembered as gentle and devout. As a girl she suffered sudden fits, sometimes lying unresponsive for hours. The biographer Caroline Fraser thinks the cause was most likely psychological.
The 1840s were brutal. Her brother Albert, her mentor, died in 1841; her first husband, George Washington Glover, died in 1844 after six months of marriage, leaving her pregnant far from home in Wilmington. Her mother died in 1849 and her fiancé three weeks later. When her father remarried, her young son was sent to live elsewhere in 1851. A second marriage, to the dentist and homeopath Daniel Patterson, was unhappy; he was captured at Bull Run in 1862 and later drifted away.
In October 1862 she went to Quimby, a Maine mesmerist who claimed to heal without medicine. She improved enough to boast of climbing 182 steps, but the gains faded. Where Quimby saw a mental technique, she saw the healing of the Gospels. Historians still argue over the debt: Fraser says she did not plagiarise him but took basic ideas and language from him; J. Gordon Melton stresses that, unlike Quimby, she embraced the Bible.
On February 1, 1866, she slipped on ice in Lynn, Massachusetts, and later said reading scripture brought a miraculous recovery. Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures followed in 1875, revised repeatedly until 1910, and in 1879 she founded the Church of Christ, Scientist. She ran a college in Massachusetts in the 1880s and led the movement until her death on December 3, 1910. Followers revere her as its discoverer, while critics consider her healing methods harmful and ineffective.
Source: Mary Baker Eddy
