Christian Science

Christian Science
The First Church of Christ, Scientist Boston, Massachusetts
Founder	Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910)
Mother Church	The First Church of Christ, Scientist, Back Bay, Boston
Key texts	Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures and Manual of the Mother Church
Membership	100,000–400,000 worldwide, as of 2008
Number of churches	1,100 in the United States, 600 elsewhere, as of 2010
Key beliefs	Scientific statement of being; "Basic teachings", Church of Christ, Scientist
Website
christianscience.com

Christian Science is a set of beliefs and practices belonging to the metaphysical family of new religious movements. It was developed in the United States by Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) after she experienced what she said was a miraculous recovery from a fall. She subsequently wrote Science and Health (1875), which argued that sickness is an illusion that can be corrected by prayer alone. The book became Christian Science's central text along with the Bible; by 2001, according to the church, it had sold ten million copies in 16 languages.

Eddy and around 25 followers were granted a charter in 1879 to found the Church of Christ (Scientist), and in 1894 the Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, was built in Boston, Massachusetts. Eddy's ideas proved popular: during the first decades of the 20th century Christian Science became the fastest growing American religion. A census in 1936 counted nearly 270,000 Scientists in the United States, a figure that had declined by the 1990s to just over 100,000; a church estimate in 2008 placed the global membership at 400,000. The religion is known for the Christian Science Monitor, which won seven Pulitzer Prizes between 1950 and 2002, and for its Reading Rooms, which are open to the public in around 1,200 cities.

Christian Scientists see their religion as consistent with Christian theology, despite key differences. In particular they subscribe to a radical form of philosophical idealism, believing that reality is purely spiritual and the material world an illusion. This includes the view that disease is a spiritual rather than physical disorder, that there is no death, and that the sick should be treated, not by medicine, but by a form of prayer that seeks to correct the beliefs responsible for the illusion of ill health.

The church does not require that Christian Scientists avoid all medicine – adherents use dentists, optometrists, obstetricians, physicians for broken bones, and vaccination when required by law – but maintains that Christian Science prayer is most effective when not combined with medical care. Between the 1880s and 1990s the avoidance of medical treatment and vaccination led to the deaths of several adherents and their children; parents and others were prosecuted for manslaughter or neglect, and in a few cases convicted.

Background and theology

Metaphysical–Christian Science–New Thought family

Further information: Great Awakening

Two periods of Protestant Christian revival known as the Second and Third Great Awakening (c. 1800–1830 and 1850–1900) nurtured a proliferation of religious movements in the United States, including Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Latter Day Saints, Spiritualists, Swedenborgians, Theosophists, and the metaphysical family.

The metaphysical family consists of several groups, including Christian Science, that were known as the mind-cure, mental-cure, or mental-healing movement, and from the mid-1890s as New Thought (though Christian Science distinguished itself from the latter). The movement emphasized the centrality of the mental world (what it called the "metaphysical"), rather than the material, and in particular saw the mind as the key to physical health. Eddy several times referred to Christian Science as "Metaphysical Science" and "Metaphysical Healing." There was keen interest in alternatives to medicine, such as homeopathy, hydropathy, mesmerism and the relationship between mind, body and diet, in large measure because medical practice was crude and frightening, but also in reaction to the idea that suffering was something to be endured as a test or punishment from God.

The mind-cure movement traced its roots to the work of New England "mental healer" Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866), whose motto was "the truth is the cure" (persuade the patient that she is not ill and she will recover); Eddy was a patient of Quimby's and was accused of having founded Christian Science on the basis of his unpublished manuscripts. William James (1842–1910) saw in mind-cure traces of spiritism, Hinduism, the subjective idealism of George Berkeley (1685–1753) and the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). The point above all was to maintain a cheerful attitude; James described the mind-cure literature as "moonstruck with optimism."

New Thought and Christian Science adherents believed they were applying newly discovered spiritual laws scientifically; Philip Jenkins wrote that they saw themselves at the "apex of modern thinking." They differed in that Eddy's philosophy was not dualist. She did not argue merely for the primacy of mind, but dismissed the material world entirely as an illusion; reality for Eddy was purely spiritual. She taught that the mind (or what she called "mortal mind") cannot cure disease, because disease is the mind's mistake and mind cannot cure what it has caused. What heals, she argued, is "not one mind acting upon another mind ... not the transference of human images of thought to other minds," but Divine Mind.

Christian Science theology

Eddy regarded Christian Science as a return to early Christianity and its "lost element of healing," and saw Science and Health as an inspired text and a kind of second coming. At the core of her theology is the idea that God's creation is entirely good, that the material world, including evil, sickness and death, are illusions, and that humankind, as an idea of God or Mind, is perfect; the limitations and flaws of "mortal man" are simply humankind's mistaken view of itself. Her radical idealism is summed up by her "scientific statement of being," which she called the "first plank in the platform of Christian Science": "There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation." For Christian Scientists, the spiritualization of thought that comes with the acceptance of this has the power to heal.

"[T]here is no person to be healed, no material body, no patient, no matter, no illness, no one to heal, no substance, no person, no thing and no place that needs to be influenced. This is what the practitioner must first be clear about."

— Frank Prinz-Wondollek,
Christian Science practitioner, 2011

Christian Science practitioners are Scientists who, for a fee, offer a special kind of prayer to address ill health or any other problem a patient might have. There is no appeal to a personal god; the process involves the practitioner engaging, alone (known as "absent treatment), in a silent rhetorical argument to reaffirm to herself the unreality of matter. She might also suggest that the patient read passages from Science and Health. In the view of Christian Science this process connects the patient, as a spiritual being, to Divine Mind; historian of religion Amanda Porterfield describes it in terms of an "invisible spiritual force that stimulates healing."

Christian Science leaders see their religion as Christian and reject any identification with the New Thought movement; Eddy herself was strongly influenced by her Congregationalist upbringing. There are nevertheless key differences between Christian Science theology and that of traditional Christianity. Eddy redefined the Christian vocabulary, leading to very different views of the Trinity, creation, divinity of Jesus, atonement, resurrection, heaven and hell.

logo

The Christian Science seal includes the Cross and Crown and words from the New Testament

Eddy saw God not as a person, but as "incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love." (In referring to God as "All-in-all" she denied that she had embraced pantheism, but that was nevertheless how the clergy interpreted it.) She distinguished, as Phineas Parkhurst Quimby had done, between Jesus the man and the concept of Christ; Christ was a quality rather than an identity, a synonym for Truth. She regarded Jesus as the first person fully to manifest Divine Mind, a template for other human beings; Eddy called him a Christian Scientist and a "Way-shower" between humanity and God, and regarded his death as an illusion like any other.

The Holy Ghost is "Divine Science" or Christian Science. Heaven and hell are states of mind. There is no death; a person who seems to die simply adjusts to a level of consciousness inaccessible to the living. Eddy also reinterpreted the Lord's Prayer: "Our Father–Mother God, all-harmonious." In 1907 Mark Twain (1835–1910) described the appeal of the new religion to Eddy's followers:

She has delivered to them a religion which has revolutionized their lives, banished the glooms that shadowed them, and filled them and flooded them with sunshine and gladness and peace; a religion which has no hell; a religion whose heaven is not put off to another time, with a break and a gulf between, but begins here and now, and melts into eternity as fancies of the waking day melt into the dreams of sleep.

They believe it is a Christianity that is in the New Testament; that it has always been there, that in the drift of ages it was lost through disuse and neglect, and that this benefactor has found it and given it back to men, turning the night of life into day, its terrors into myths, its lamentations into songs of emancipation and rejoicing.

Eddy's view of Science and Health as inspired by God represented a challenge to the Bible's authority, in the opinion of the more conservative of the Protestant clergy. "Eddyism," as it was known, was regularly referred to as a cult; one of the first uses of the modern sense of the word cult was in Anti-Christian Cults (1898) by A. H. Barrington, a book about Spiritualism, Theosophy and Christian Science. Some ministers interpreted Christian Science as gnosticism, the idea (regarded by Christians as heretical) that the material world is the result of a mistake on the part of a supreme being and the work of a demiurge. Others defended the new religion's rejection of materialism. In a few cases Christian Scientists saw themselves expelled from Christian congregations, but for the most part ministers worried that their parishioners were crossing over. A correspondent in the London Times wrote in May 1885: "Scores of the most valued church members are joining the Christian Science branch of the metaphysical organization, and it has thus far been impossible to check the defection."

History

Birth

Mary Baker Eddy

Christian Science
Mary Baker Eddy in the 1850s, the earliest known photograph of her
Born	Mary Morse Baker (1821-07-16)July 16, 1821 Bow, New Hampshire
Died	December 3, 1910(1910-12-03) (aged 89) Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
More details Resting place Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts Spouse(s) George Washington Glover (m. 1843–1844) Daniel Patterson (m. 1853–1873, separated 1866) Asa Gilbert Eddy (m. 1877–1882) Children George Washington Glover II (born 1844) Parent(s) Mark Baker (d. 1865) Abigail Ambrose Baker (d. 1849)

Mary Baker Eddy was born Mary Morse Baker on a farm in Bow, New Hampshire, the youngest of six children. The family were Protestant Congregationalists; her father, Mark Baker, was a deeply religious man who would lead the family in lengthy prayer every morning and evening. In common with most women at the time, she was given little formal education, but by some accounts she read widely at home.

Eddy experienced protracted ill health from childhood, with conditions she described as chronic indigestion and spinal inflammation, and established a pattern of appearing to be seriously ill, even losing consciousness, then quickly recovering. The literary critic Harold Bloom described her as "an extraordinary wreck, a monumental hysteric of classical dimensions, indeed a kind of anthology of nineteenth-century nervous ailments." McClure's magazine wrote in 1907, in a series of highly critical articles: "Nothing had the power of exciting Mark Baker like one of Mary's 'fits,' as they were called. His neighbors ... remember him as he went to fetch Dr. Ladd, how he lashed his horses down the hill, standing upright in his wagon and shouting in his tremendous voice: 'Mary is dying!'"

Christian Scientists regard this criticism as inaccurate and sexist, an attack (typical of that period) on the sanity of a woman who was challenging powerful male interests. Eddy was a target of this, they argue, because she stood against the hegemony of the clergy and medical establishment.

Eddy's first husband died shortly before her 23rd birthday, six months after they married and three months before the birth of their son, leaving her penniless; as a result of her poor health she lost custody of the boy when he was four, although sources differ as to whether she could have prevented this. Her second husband, who left her after 13 years of marriage, promised to become the child's legal guardian – per the legal doctrine of coverture, women at that time in the United States could not be their own children's guardians – but it is unclear whether he did, and Eddy lost contact with her son until he was in his thirties. Her third husband, Asa Gilbert Eddy, died five years after they married.

She wore an imported black satin dress heavily beaded with tiny black jet beads, black satin slippers, beaded, and had on her rarely beautiful diamonds. ... She stood before us, seemingly slight, graceful of carriage, and exquisitely beautiful even to critical eyes. Then, still standing, she faced her class as one who knew herself to be a teacher by divine right.

– C. Lulu Blackman, 1885

Gillian Gill, one of Eddy's biographers, wrote that Eddy was by all accounts charismatic – charming and flattering when she needed to be – and able to inspire great loyalty, although she could also be irrational, capricious and unkind. It was in part because of her unusual personality that Christian Science flourished, despite the numerous legal and other disputes she initiated, including among her closest followers.

"She was like a patch of colour in those gray communities," McClure's wrote, "She never laid aside her regal air; never entered a room or left it like other people. There was something about her that continually excited and stimulated, and she gave people the feeling that a great deal was happening." Mark Twain, a prominent critic of hers, described her as "vain, untruthful [and] jealous," but "[i]n several ways ... the most interesting woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary."

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby

Eddy tried every remedy for her ailments, including homeopathy, mesmerism, hydropathy at the Vail's Hydropathic Institute in Hill, New Hampshire, and the vegetarian Graham diet of the Rev. Sylvester Graham (1794–1851), who took the view that "all medicine, as such, is itself an evil." According to Ronald Numbers and Rennie Schoepflin, alternative practitioners were much sought after at a time when physicians, or allopaths as they were known, regularly "bled, puked and purged" their patients.

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby

In 1862 Eddy heard of "Quimbyism," a healing method developed by Phineas Parkhurst "Park" Quimby (1802–1866), a former clockmaker who worked in Portland, Maine. Styled Dr. P.P. Quimby, he called himself "a teacher of the science of health and happiness," and his philosophy was "the truth is the cure." This would sometimes consist of shouting at a patient who could not walk, "you can walk!" McClure's wrote of Quimby that, although he had had only six weeks' schooling, he was regarded as a "mild-mannered New England Socrates" because of his refusal to accept anything on authority. So far as local legend was concerned, McClure's wrote, when Quimby got to work consumptives recovered and the blind saw.

Treating people whether or not they could pay, Quimby started practicing after hearing a lecture by the French mesmerist Charles Poyen, who visited Maine in 1838. Mesmerism, also called animal magnetism, was named after Franz Mesmer (1734–1815), a German physician who argued that animals produced an invisible force or fluid that could be used to heal. Quimby saw himself as a medium or clairvoyant who could feel and change this fluid, thereby correcting his patients' mistaken view that they were ill. For years he and an assistant, Lucius Burkmar, traveled around New England giving demonstrations.

Quimby argued that the real person – spiritual man or "scientific man" – is the perfect embodiment of Spirit, Wisdom, Principle, Truth, Mind, Science. Scientific man cannot be sick, but he is overwhelmed by the man of matter and false beliefs. (He drew a similar distinction between Jesus the man and the concept of Christ or Truth.) "Man is made up of truth and belief," Quimby wrote, "and, if he is deceived into a belief that he has, or is liable to have, a disease, the belief is catching, and the effect follows it." In the 1850s he began to write his ideas down; he was generous in allowing patients to copy these unpublished manuscripts, which became an issue when Eddy was accused, after his death, of having based her own writing on his.

Eddy wrote to Quimby in August 1862, telling him she could barely sit up; she had to be carried up the stairs to his consulting rooms (she told the Boston Post in 1883 that, before she saw Quimby, she had been more or less confined to her bed or room for seven years). She felt better immediately and returned to see him several times.

The fall in Lynn

Eddy's father died in October 1865 when she was 44 years old, followed by the death of Quimby on January 16, 1866. Eddy wrote a poem on January 22, "Lines on the Death of Dr. P. P. Quimby, Who Healed with the Truth that Christ Taught, in Contradistinction to All Isms," which was published in a local newspaper. Two weeks later, on February 1, Eddy slipped on some ice in Lynn, Massachusetts, injuring her head and neck. She recovered after a few days of bed rest. Years later, she wrote that, while in bed from the fall, she had read a Bible passage about one of Jesus's healings and that it was this reading, or an insight she experienced because of the reading (Eddy called it a revelation), that healed her. Christian Scientists call this the "fall in Lynn," and see it as the birth of their religion. Eddy wrote to a prospective student in 1871:

Mrs. Mary Patterson of Swampscott fell upon the ice near the corner of Market and Oxford Streets on Thursday evening and was severely injured. She was taken up in an insensible condition and carried into the residence of S.M. Bubier, Esq., near by, where she was kindly cared for during the night. Doctor Cushing, who was called, found her injuries to be internal and of a serious nature, inducing spasms and internal suffering. She was removed to her home in Swampscott yesterday afternoon, though in a critical condition.

— Lynn Reporter, February 3, 1866

Dr. Cushing of this city pronounced my injury incurable and that I could not survive three days because of it, when on the third day I rose from my bed and to the utter confusion of all I commenced my usual avocations and notwithstanding displacements, etc., I regained the natural position and functions of the body.

The physician who treated her, Alvin M. Cushing, swore an affidavit for McClure's in 1907 in which he said the injury had not been a serious one, that he had not told Eddy otherwise, and that she had responded over the next few days to morphine and a homeopathic remedy (arnica); Eddy had not said anything to him about a miraculous healing.

The degree to which she considered herself healed at the time is also disputed. Two weeks after the accident she wrote to Julius Dresser (1838–1893), who had been a patient and devotee of Quimby's and had become his office manager. She enclosed the poem she had written for Quimby and asked Dresser to "step forward into the place [Quimby had] vacated." She told Dresser she had awoken after the fall to find herself "the helpless cripple I was before I saw Dr. Quimby," and asked if he would treat her. Several months later she again suggested she had not recovered from the fall; in June 1866 the Mayor of Lynn told the city Eddy had sent them a letter "in which she states that owing to the unsafe condition of [the streets] ... she slipped and fell, causing serious personal injuries, from which she has little prospect of recovering, and asking for pecuniary recompense for the injuries received."

In her autobiography, Retrospection and Introspection (1891), Eddy was clear about attributing the discovery of Christian Science prayer to the fall in Lynn. But in the first edition of Science and Health (1875), she wrote that she had discovered it while struggling with indigestion as a child. Eddy offered more than one version of this. In the first edition she wrote that she had spent years of her youth following a rigid version of the Graham diet: a once-a-day helping of vegetables, a slice of bread, and water. She continued: "After years of suffering ... our eyes were suddenly opened, and we learned suffering is self-imposed, a belief, and not truth." In later editions, when the fall in Lynn took precedence, Eddy attributed the indigestion to a woman she had known and offered its disappearance as the result of Christian Science prayer. In the final edition she wrote that it had happened to a man she had known.

Writing and teaching

Richard Kennedy's practice

Eddy's ad (second ad, as Mary B. Glover), Banner of Light, July 4, 1868

Eddy separated from her second husband, Daniel Patterson, in 1866 after 13 years of marriage. Left without a home, she moved between lodgings, either with friends or in boarding houses. Money was a constant source of worry. In June and July 1868 she advertised for students in a spiritualist magazine, the Banner of Light, promising a new healing method, a "principle of science" that would heal with "[n]o medicine, electricity, physiology or hygiene required for unparalleled success in the most difficult cases." The ad was signed Mary B. Glover, using her first husband's surname.

She at first called her ideas Moral Science, and later Divine Science, Metaphysical Science, Metaphysical Healing, the Christ-cure and the Truth-cure. In the first edition of Science and Health in 1875 she called it Christian Science too, first using the lower-case science, but later in the same edition capitalizing it. Quimby had referred to the "religion of Christ [being] shown in the progress of Christian science" in his essay "Aristocracy and Democracy." She may also have found the term in Edmond de Pressensé's (1824–1891) The Early Years of Christianity (1870), a copy of which was in her library; she had underlined a passage that referred to primitive Christianity and Christian science.

Eddy became close to a fellow lodger, Richard Kennedy, in one of the Spiritualist boarding houses she lived in (she would later accuse him of using mesmerism against her). When they met he was a teenager working in a box factory. She began to teach him Moral Science and in 1870 they decided to open a practice in Lynn; he would see patients and she would teach. Her business card read "Mrs. Mary M. Glover, Teacher of Moral Science." Kennedy agreed to pay her $1,000 for the previous two years' tuition in quarterly installments of $50. He leased rooms in June that year on the second floor of Miss Susie Magoun's school on the corner of Shepard Street and South Common, and put a sign in the yard, "Dr. Kennedy"; he was 21 at this point and Eddy was in her fifties. The practice became popular; Cather and Milmine wrote that people would say: "Go to Dr. Kennedy. He can't hurt you, even if he doesn't help you."

The Science of Man

Richard Kennedy in 1871

Eddy placed an ad in the Lynn Semi-Weekly Reporter on August 13, 1870: "Mrs. Glover, the well-known Scientist, will receive applications for one week from ladies and gentlemen who wish to learn how to heal the sick without medicine, and with a success unequaled by any known method of the present day, at Dr. Kennedy's office, No. 71 South Common Street, Lynn, Mass."

Many of the students were shoe workers; Lynn was a center of the shoe industry. When the classes began Eddy charged $100, raised a few weeks later to $300 (one third of a shoe worker's annual income), for a three-week, 12-lesson course. She based the lessons on an unpublished manuscript that she called The Science of Man or the principle which controls all phenomena, and later The Science of Man by which the Sick are healed, or Questions and Answers in Moral Science. McClure's and others charged that this manuscript was Quimby's.

Part of the manuscript Eddy used in her classes

In these early years Eddy did acknowledge her debt to Quimby. When a prospective student asked in 1871 whether her methods had been advertised or practiced before, she replied: "Never advertised and practiced only by one individual who healed me, Dr. Quimby ... I discovered the art in a moment's time, and he acknowledged it to me; he died shortly after and since then, eight years, I have been founding and demonstrating the science." Two books were published around that time, The Mental Cure (1871) and Mental Medicine (1872), by Warren F. Evans, a Swedenborgian minister who had been in touch with Quimby, and which elaborated on the same or a similar healing system.

Eddy's classes consisted of lessons in metaphysics, in question-and-answer format, beginning with "What is God?" The answer was "Principle, wisdom, love, and truth," rather than the anthropomorphic vision the students were used to. They were told to make a copy of the manuscript, but were forbidden, under a $3,000 bond, from showing it to anyone. They agreed to pay her 10 percent annually of any income they derived from her methods and $1,000 if they did not practice or teach it. The manuscript advised students to rub their patients' heads, as Quimby had done, but when a student accused Eddy of practicing mesmerism and demanded a refund, she told her remaining students to ignore that part of the manuscript, and from that point on Christian Science healing did not involve touching patients.

It was a running thread throughout Eddy's life that she fell out with those around her, and inevitably Kennedy was added to that list. He came to believe that Moral Science could achieve far less than Eddy promised, and although his practice and her classes were flourishing he urged her to be more circumspect, which angered her. In November 1871 she accused him in front of others of cheating at cards; it was one of many scenes she had caused between them and he walked out on her, ignoring one of her fainting spells.

Mary B. Glover's Christian Scientists' Home

8 Broad Street, Lynn, Massachusetts, around 1875. The sign for Mary B. Glover's Christian Scientists' Home is visible.

Once Kennedy and Eddy had settled their financial affairs in May 1872, she was left with $6,000. Peel writes that she had already started work on Science and Health, and at that point had completed 60 pages. She again moved between boarding houses and the homes of friends, and was renting rooms in Lynn at 9 Broad Street, when the house opposite came on the market. She purchased 8 Broad Street in March 1875 for $5,650, taking in tenants to pay the mortgage. It was in the attic room of this house that she completed the first edition of Science and Health.

Shortly after moving in, Eddy became close to another student, Daniel Spofford. He was 33 years old and married when he joined her class (his wife had taken it years earlier); he ended up leaving his wife in the hope that he might marry Eddy, but his feelings were not reciprocated. Spofford and seven other students agreed to form an association that would pay Eddy a certain amount a week for one year if she would preach to them every Sunday. They called themselves the Christian Scientists Association. Spofford would later find himself the object of Eddy's fury: expelled from the association, sued for engaging in mental malpractice, and allegedly targeted for murder by Eddy's third husband (a claim that remained unproven).

Eddy placed a sign on 8 Broad Street, Mary B. Glover's Christian Scientists' Home. According to Cather and Milmine, there was a regular turnover of tenants and domestic staff, whom Eddy accused of stealing from the house; she blamed Richard Kennedy for turning people against her using mental malpractice. Peel writes that there was also local gossip about the attractive woman, the men who came and went, and whether she was engaged in witchcraft. She was hurt, but made light of it: "Of course I believe in free love; I love everyone."

Science and Health

Further information: Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures

From Eddy's Christ and Christmas (1897); Eddy writing Science and Health in her skylight room at 8 Broad Street, Lynn

Eddy copyrighted her book, then called The Science of Life, in July 1874. Several publishers turned it down, but in September that year a printer agreed to handle it if Eddy would pay the costs. Three of her students, George Barry, Elizabeth Newhall and Daniel Spofford, came up with the necessary $2,000, and after much proofreading and revision by Eddy, it was published by the Christian Science Publishing Company on October 30, 1875, as Science and Health, with eight chapters and 456 pages. (Barry ended up suing Eddy for, among other things, payment for his copying the manuscript in long hand for the printer.)

Martin Gardner (1914–2010) called the book a "chaotic patchwork of repetitious, poorly paragraphed topics," full of spelling, punctuation and grammatical mistakes. It was positively received by Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888), who wrote to Eddy in January 1876 that she had "reaffirm[ed] in modern phrase the Christian revelations," and that he was pleased to see it had been written by a woman.

Eddy added Key to the Scriptures to the sixth edition in 1884, and for the 16th edition hired an editor, James Henry Wiggin (1836–1900), a Unitarian clergyman. Eddy's personal assistant, Calvin Frye (1845–1917), contacted Wiggin in August 1885 for help; Wiggin told his literary executor that he was surprised by the mistakes, contradictions and untidy structure, so he rewrote the book and added a new chapter, "Wayside Hints."

A later photograph of 8 Broad Street shows the sign for the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, founded in 1881

People said that simply reading Science and Health had been enough to heal them; cures were claimed for everything from cancer to blindness. New York lawyer William Purrington argued in 1900 that the beneficiaries were "hysterical patients, the morbidly introspective, the worriers, the malades imaginaires, the victims of obscure nervous ailments." Richard Cabot (1868–1939) of Harvard Medical School investigated the testimonies that appeared in the Christian Science Journal, which Eddy founded in 1883, for his senior thesis, The Medical Bearing of Mind-Care (1892). He wrote in McClure's in 1908 that the claims were based on self-diagnosis or secondhand stories about what a doctor had supposedly said, and could be attributed to the placebo effect.

Eddy continued to revise the book until her death in 1910, issuing 432 editions in all; the final edition ran to 18 chapters and 600 pages. She encouraged members to buy a new copy whenever she published a major revision, which brought in significant earnings. Other income derived from the sale of rings and brooches, pictures of Eddy, and in 1889 the Mary Baker Eddy souvenir spoon; Eddy asked every Christian Scientist to buy at least one, or a dozen if they could afford to.

When the copyright on Science and Health expired in 1971, the church persuaded Congress to pass a law, overturned in 1987 as unconstitutional, extending it to the year 2046; the bill to extend the copyright was supported by two of President Nixon's aides, Christian Scientists H.R. Haldeman (1926–1993) and John Ehrlichman (1925–1999). By April 2001, according to the church, the book had sold ten million copies and was available in 16 languages and English Braille.

Eddy's view: sickness is belief

Further information: § Prayer and testimonies

Science and Health expanded on the view that, as Quimby had argued, sickness was a belief. Eddy wrote in the first edition: "Physical effects proceed from mental causes; the belief we can move our hand moves it, and the belief we cannot do this renders it impossible during this state of mind. Palsy is a belief that attacks mind, and holds a limb inactive independent of the mind's consent, but the fact that a limb is moved only with mind proves the opposite, namely, that mind renders it also immovable."

My experiments in homeopathy had made me sceptical as to material curative methods. ... [T]he drug is attenuated to such a degree that not a vestige of it remains; and from this I learn that it is not the drug that cures the disease or changes one of the symptoms ... The highest attenuation of homeopathy and the most potent steps out of matter into Mind; and thus it should be seen that Mind is the healer, or metaphysics, and that there is no efficacy in the drug.

– Mary Baker Eddy, 1889

"Agree not with sickness," she wrote, "meet the physical condition with a mental protest, that destroys it as one property destroys another in chemistry." She wrote years later that she had personally healed tuberculosis, diphtheria and cancer: "at one visit a cancer that had eaten the flesh of the neck and exposed the jugular vein so that it stood out like a cord. I have physically restored sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, speech to the dumb, and have made the lame walk."

Eddy's views derived in part from her skepticism about homeopathy, after she witnessed what was arguably the placebo effect in patients she said she had treated with homeopathic remedies; they seemed to recover despite being administered remedies so diluted they were drinking plain water. She concluded from this that Mind, or what she called "metaphysics," was the healer.

In later editions of Science and Health she wrote that even naming and reading about disease was sufficient to externalize thoughts as physical symptoms. She argued similarly against the recording of ages: "Timetables of birth and death are so many conspiracies against manhood and womanhood." To counter the argument that people can be harmed by poison in the absence of any belief about it, she referred to the power of majority opinion.

She allowed exceptions from Christian Science prayer for the dentist and basic surgical procedures, such as fixing broken limbs; she said that she had healed broken bones using "mental surgery," but that this skill would be the last to be learned. She herself wore glasses, used morphine, had her third husband treated by a physician, and arranged for an autopsy when he died. But for the most part (then and now), Christian Scientists believe that medicine and Christian Science prayer are incompatible, because they proceed from contradictory assumptions. Medicine asserts that something is physically broken and needs to be fixed, while Christian Science asserts that the spiritual reality is perfect and that any belief to the contrary needs to be corrected.

Eddy's debt to Quimby

Gill wrote that the nature of Eddy's debt to Quimby became the single most controversial issue of her life. In later editions of Science and Health Eddy drew a distinction between her methods and Quimby's, maintaining that the "theology of Christian Science is based on the action of the divine Mind over the human mind and body whereas, 'mind-cure' rests on the notion that the human mind can cure its own disease."

It is apparent, then, that in Christian Science it is not one man's mind acting upon another man's mind that heals; that it is solely the Spirit of God that heals; that the healer's mind performs no office but to convey that force to the patient; that it is merely the wire which carries the electric fluid, so to speak, and delivers the message. Therefore, if these things be true, mental-healing and Science-healing are separate and distinct processes, and no kinship exists between them.

– Mark Twain, Christian Science (1907)

Ernest Sutherland Bates (1879–1939) and John V. Dittemore, a former director of the Christian Science church, argued in their 1932 biography of Eddy that Science and Health is "practically all Quimby," except for the idea of malicious animal mesmerism. In February 1883 one of Quimby's followers, Julius Dresser, accused Eddy in the Boston Post of having plagiarized Quimby's unpublished manuscript.

Eddy denied the charge; on the contrary, she insisted, it was she who had influenced Quimby. The issue ended up in court in 1883 when Eddy filed a complaint about a publication of Edward J Arens, one of her students. He had published a pamphlet in June 1881, Theology, or the Understanding of God as Applied to Healing the Sick, that copied over 20 pages of Science and Health; he credited Quimby, Jesus, the Gottesfreunde, and "some thoughts contained in a work by Eddy." Arens counter-claimed that Eddy had plagiarized it from Quimby in the first place. Quimby's family was unwilling to produce his manuscript for the lawsuit, and Eddy won the case.

Eddy suggested that her own work was being confused for Quimby's; she had handed her manuscripts out to students, she said, and now "the evil-minded" were saying those texts did not originate with her. She was accused again in July 1904 in the New York Times, which had obtained one of Quimby's unpublished manuscripts. McClure's also obtained a Quimby manuscript and repeated the charge in 1907: "For 20 closely written pages, Quimby's manuscript, Questions and Answers, is word for word the same as Mrs. Glover's manuscript, The Science of Man." The Quimby Manuscripts were eventually published in 1921 by Julius Dresser's son, Horatio Dresser (1866–1954). Sources differ as to whether the plagiarism charge stands. Martin Gardner maintained in 1993 that it did, while Caroline Fraser wrote that the plagiarism claims had been exaggerated, but that it was clear Quimby was Eddy's inspiration.

Malicious animal magnetism

In January 1877 Eddy spurned an approach from Daniel Spofford, and to everyone's surprise married another of her students, Asa Gilbert Eddy (1826–1882). Eddy already believed that her former student Richard Kennedy was plotting against her; weeks after the wedding Spofford was added to the list. She had hinted in October 1876 that he might be a successor; instead he found himself expelled from the Christian Scientists' Association in January 1878 for "immorality" after quarrelling with her over money. She also filed lawsuits against Spofford and several other students to recover royalties from their healing practices or unpaid tuition fees. Cather and Milmine wrote that Eddy "required of her students absolute and unquestioning conformity to her wishes; any other attitude of mind she regarded as dangerous."

The conviction that she was at the center of plots and counter-plots became a feature of Eddy's life. This was expressed as a belief that the mind could act at a distance to cause harm or even death (or, at least, the illusion of harm or death), and that several of her students were using this power against her. She called it malicious animal magnetism (MAM), malicious mesmerism or mental malpractice. Eddy wrote in earlier editions of Science and Health, for example in 1889, that MAM was "literally demonology" (a sentence missing from the final edition), and that it had gained strength from Christian Science "as if to forestall the power of good." She spoke openly about it, including to the press, despite the ridicule it attracted.

Everything that went wrong in her life from the late 1870s she blamed on MAM. Cather and Milmine wrote: "Those of her students who believed in mesmerism were always on their guard with each other, filled with suspicion and distrust. Those who did not believe in it dared not admit their disbelief. If a member of that household denied the doctrine, or even showed a lack of interest in it, he was at once pronounced a mesmerist and requested to leave."

Salem witchcraft trial, murder charge

Further information: Salem witchcraft trial (1878)

Eddy accused Daniel Spofford, one of her first students, of practising malicious mesmerism on her.

In May 1878 Eddy brought a case against Spofford, in the name of a patient, Lucretia Brown, in Salem, Massachusetts, for practicing mesmerism; it came to be known as the second Salem witchcraft trial. For reasons that remain unclear, Brown believed that Spofford had bewitched her, causing her, according to Eddy, "severe spinal pains and neuralgia and a temporary suspension of mind." Eddy held a power of attorney allowing her to appear in court on Brown's behalf, along with 20 of her supporters (a "cloud of witnesses," according to the Boston Globe), but Judge Horace Gray (1828–1902) declined to hear the case. Amos Bronson Alcott accompanied Eddy to the hearing.

In preparation for the hearing, Eddy organized a 24-hour "watch" at 8 Broad Street, during which she asked 12 of her students to use their minds for two hours each to think of Spofford and block the MAM. She continued to organize these watches, or "private meetings," for the rest of her life; the students would be required to give "adverse treatment" to one of her enemies, often Richard Kennedy, calling him, for example, bilious, consumptive, or poisoned by arsenic. At her Pleasant View home in Concord, New Hampshire, where she lived from 1889, she required the watchers to attend hour-long meetings at least twice a day to address manifestations of MAM.

The attempt to have Spofford tried was not the end of the dispute. In October 1878 Eddy's husband and another of her students, Edward Arens (whom Eddy accused four years later of having killed her husband with MAM when he died of a heart condition), were charged with conspiring to murder Spofford. A barman said they had offered him $500 to carry out the killing; after a complex series of claims and counter-claims, the charges were dropped when a key witness retracted his statement. Eddy attributed the allegations to a plot by former students to undermine sales of the second edition of Science and Health, just published. Her lawyer ended up having to file for an attachment against her house to collect his fee.

Growth

Establishing the church, move to Boston

Calvin Frye was one of the few students who stayed with Eddy in 1881; he remained loyal to her for the rest of her life.

On August 23, 1879, shortly after the conspiracy-to-murder allegation had receded, the Christian Scientists' Association was granted a charter to form the Church of Christ (Scientist). With an initial congregation of 26 members, services were held in people's homes in Lynn and later in Hawthorne Hall, Boston. On January 31, 1881, Eddy was granted a charter to form the Massachusetts Metaphysical College. The college lived wherever Eddy was teaching; a new sign appeared on 8 Broad Street. The college's stated purpose: "To teach pathology, ontology, therapeutics, moral science, metaphysics, and their application to the treatment of disease."

In October 1881 there was a revolt. Eight of the church's most active members resigned from the church and the association after tiring of malicious mesmerism and the legal disputes. They signed a document complaining of Eddy's "frequent ebullitions of temper, love of money, and the appearance of hypocrisy." Only a few students remained, including Calvin Frye (1845–1917), who went on to become her most loyal personal assistant. Eddy rallied the remaining members, who appointed her pastor of the new church in November 1881. They drew up a resolution in February 1882 that she was "the chosen messenger of God to the nations," and "unless we hear Her voice we do not hear His voice."

The resignations ended Eddy's time in Lynn. The church was struggling to survive and her reputation had been damaged by the internal dissent. By now 61 years old, she decided to move to Boston and in early 1882 rented a house at 569 Columbus Avenue, a silver plaque announcing the arrival of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College. Between 1881 and 1889, when Eddy closed the college, 4,000 students took her 12-lesson course, at $300 a person, making her a rich woman. Mark Twain wrote that she had turned a sawdust mine (possibly Quimby's) into a Klondike.

Third husband's death, first journal, first church

When Eddy's third husband, Asa Gilbert Eddy, died she blamed malicious mesmerism.

Shortly after the move to Boston, Eddy's husband died of heart disease. On the day of his death, June 4, 1882, she asked the Boston Globe to send a reporter to her home. The newspaper said she appeared "much overcome" and "could scarcely control herself enough to make the following statement":

Her husband, she said, had died with every symptom of arsenical poisoning. Both he and she knew it to be the result of a malicious mesmeric influence exerted upon his mind by certain parties here in Boston, who had sworn to injure them. She had formerly had the same symptoms of arsenical poison herself, and it was some time before she discovered it to be the mesmeric work of an enemy. Soon after her marriage her husband began to manifest the same symptoms and had since shown them from time to time; but was, with her help, always able to overcome them. A few weeks ago she observed that he did not look well, and when questioned he said that he was unable to get the idea of this arsenical poison out of his mind. He had been steadily growing worse ever since, but still had hoped to overcome the trouble until the last. After the death the body had turned black.

First Church of Christ, Scientist, Oconto, Wisconsin

A doctor performed an autopsy, and showed Eddy her husband's diseased heart, but she responded with more interviews about the mesmerism claim. Fraser wrote that the articles made Eddy a household name, a real-life version of the charismatic and beautiful Verena Tarrant in Henry James's The Bostonians (1885–1886), with her interest in spiritualism, women's rights and the mind cure.

After her husband's death, Eddy move next door to 571 Columbus Avenue. Several students moved in with her; she held her lectures there and the students saw patients. In 1883 she founded the Journal of Christian Science, later called the Christian Science Journal, which spread news of her ideas still further. According to Cather and Milmine: "Copies found their way to remote villages in Missouri and Arkansas, to lonely places in Nebraska and Colorado, where people had much time for reflection, little excitement, and a great need to believe in miracles."

The first Christian Science church was erected in 1886 in Oconto, Wisconsin, at a cost of $1,137.20, by several local women who believed they had been helped by Christian Science. By 1890 the Church of Christ (Scientist) had 8,724 members in the United States, after starting out 11 years earlier with just 26.

First prosecutions

From the 1880s several adults and children died after being offered Christian Science prayer instead of medical treatment, leading to around 50 prosecutions of parents and Christian Science practitioners between then and the 1990s. The American Medical Association (AMA) declared war on Christian Scientists, calling them in 1895: "Molochs to infants, and pestilential perils to communities in spreading contagious diseases."

Despite the opposition from physicians, prosecutors and prominent newspapers, juries were reluctant to convict where there was a sincere belief that the patient was being helped. There was also opposition to the AMA's effort to strengthen medical licencing laws to outlaw Christian Science treatment. Historian Shawn Francis Peters writes that other religions rallied to the Christian Scientists' defence against attempts to hand physicians a legal monopoly on healing. In the courts and in public debate, Christian Scientists and Jehovah's Witnesses linked their healing claims directly to early Christianity, a "rhetorically savvy move," according to Peters.

The First Church of Christ, Scientist, Boston, built in 1894, photographed in 1900

The first prosecution was in March 1888 when Abby H. Corner, a practitioner in Medford, Massachusetts, was charged with manslaughter after attending to her own daughter during childbirth; the daughter bled to death and the baby did not survive. The defense argued that the bleeding might have been fatal even with medical attention, and Corner was acquitted.

Eddy distanced herself from Corner, to the dismay of the Christian Scientists' Association. She told the Boston Globe that Corner had never entered the obstetrics class at the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, and had attended the college for one term only. According to Cather and Milmine, the obstetrics course was a recent development; Eddy had for years allowed her students to attend women in childbirth and had even called herself "Professor of Obstetrics" in 1882. They wrote: "Hundreds of Mrs. Eddy's students were then practising who knew no more about obstetrics than the babes they helped into this world."

In 1893 Ezra Buswell, a practitioner in Beatrice, Nebraska, was charged with practicing medicine without a licence after a child died of cholera under his care; a jury acquitted but he was convicted on appeal. Practitioners in Ohio, Minnesota and Wisconsin were acquitted of the same offence in 1898, 1899 and 1900. In 1898 novelist Harold Frederic, London correspondent for the New York Times, died in England of heart disease after being attended to by a practitioner, but charges of manslaughter against the practitioner and Frederic's mistress were dropped. The following year seven-year-old Rolfe Saunders died of pneumonia without medical care at Fort Porter, near Buffalo, New York; a grand jury failed to return indictments against his Christian Scientist parents and two practitioners.

Eddy issued instructions in 1902 that Christian Scientists would no longer treat infectious diseases and should report them as required by law, after the death that year of seven-year-old Esther Quimby of diphtheria in White Plains, New York. In failing to have her quarantined, her parents had exposed others to the infection; the parents and the practitioner, John C. Lathrop, were charged with manslaughter, but the case was dismissed. In England in 1913 Christian Scientist Benjamin Jewell was also acquitted of manslaughter after his seven-year-old daughter died of diphtheria; the judge ruled that, in having called for a practitioner rather than a doctor, the neglect was not clearly willful.

Building the Mother Church, fastest growing religion

The cornerstone of the Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, was laid in May 1894 in the Back Bay area of Boston. The stone was hollow and contained the Bible, Eddy's writings, and a list of directors and financial contributors. Eddy had purchased the land and church members raised the funds for the construction; the building was finished in December 1894 at a cost of $250,000.

The First Church of Christ, Scientist, Boston, showing the original church, built in 1894, and the later extension

The church contained a "Mother's Room" in the tower for Eddy's personal use. The archway at the entrance to the room was made of Italian marble, with the word Mother engraved on the floor. It was furnished with rare books, silks, tapestries, Persian rugs, a 200-year-old lamp, a fireplace rug made of 100 duck skins, and a dressing gown, slippers, handkerchiefs and a pin cushion. Gill wrote that Eddy spent only one night there; it was eventually turned into a storage room.

By April 1896 the Boston membership had exceeded the church's seating capacity, and plans began for an extension. By 1903 the whole block around the church had been purchased by Christian Scientists and the extension was completed in 1906; it accommodated 5,000 people at a cost of $2 million. This attracted the criticism that, while Christian Scientists were willing to spend money on a magnificent new church, they maintained no hospitals, orphanages or missions in the slums.

Christian Science went on to become the fastest growing American religion in the first few decades of the 20th century. The US federal religious census recorded 85,717 Christian Scientists in 1906; 30 years later it was 268,915. There were just seven Christian Science churches in that country in 1890, a figure that by 1910 had risen to 1,077, and churches began to appear in other countries: 58 in England, 38 in Canada and 28 elsewhere by 1910.

View of Mark Twain

The writer Mark Twain was a prominent critic.

Mark Twain was a contemporaneous critic of Eddy's. His first article about her was published in Cosmopolitan in October 1899. Another three articles appeared between December 1902 and February 1903 in North American Review, then a book, Christian Science (1907). He also wrote "The Secret History of Eddypus, the World Empire" (1901–1902), in which Christian Science replaces Christianity and Eddy becomes the Pope.

Twain described Eddy as "[g]rasping, sordid, penurious, famishing for everything she sees – money, power, glory – vain, untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent, pitiless where thinkers and hypnotists are concerned, illiterate, shallow, incapable of reasoning outside of commercial lines, immeasurably selfish." Incensed by the view that she was using Christian Science to accrue wealth, he wrote: "From end to end of the Christian Science literature not a single (material) thing in the world is conceded to be real, except the Dollar."

Science and Health he called "strange and frantic and incomprehensible and uninterpretable" (though he also argued that Eddy had not written it herself): "There is nothing in Christian Science that is not explicable; for God is one, Time is one, Individuality is one, and may be one of a series, one of many, as an individual man, individual horse; whereas God is one, not one of a series, but one alone and without an equal." Eddy apart, Twain felt ambivalent toward mind-cure; he argued that "the thing back of it is wholly gracious and beautiful." His daughter Clara (1874–1962) became a Christian Scientist and wrote a book about it, Awake to a Perfect Day (1956).

McClure's articles

Willa Cather, winner of the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for the novel One of Ours, was the principal author of the McClure's articles.

The first biography of Eddy, and the first history of Christian Science, appeared in McClure's magazine (1893–1929) in a devastating critique published in 14 installments between January 1907 and June 1908, preceded by an editorial in December 1906. The essence of the articles is that Eddy was an uneducated, dishonest plagiarist whose chief concern was money. The material, which included court documents, news articles from the 1880s, and affidavits from people who knew Eddy, was published in book form in 1909 as The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science. It became the key source for most subsequent non-church histories of the religion.

The editor-in-chief S.S. McClure (1857–1949) assigned five writers to work on the series: Willa Cather (1873–1947), who was the principal author; Burton J. Hendrick (1870–1949); Will Irwin (1873–1948); political columnist Mark Sullivan (1874–1952); researcher Georgine Milmine (1874–1950); and briefly Ida Tarbell (1857–1944). The book was kept out of print from early in its life by the Christian Science church, which bought the original manuscript. It was republished in 1971 by Baker Book House when its copyright expired, and again in 1993 by the University of Nebraska Press.

In his introduction to the 1993 edition, David Stouck wrote that Willa Cather's portrayal of Eddy contains "some of the finest portrait sketches and reflections on human nature" that she would ever write. Gillian Gill took a different view of the material. She argued that a great deal of it was based on anonymous sources and was designed to damage Eddy during a lawsuit, the so-called "Next Friends" suit, in which her relatives sought to have her declared unable to manage her own affairs.

Next Friends suit, Christian Science Monitor, Eddy's death

In March 1907 several of Eddy's relatives, including her son, George Glover, filed the "Next Friends suit" against members of Eddy's household staff. The suit alleged that the staff, including Eddy's personal assistant Calvin Frye (1845–1917), were misusing her property and that Eddy, by then 85 years old, was unable to conduct her own affairs. One of the plaintiffs was Ebenezer Johnson Foster Eddy, a homeopath Eddy had legally adopted in November 1888 when she was 68 and he was 41; the idea behind the adoption, according to Cather and Milmine, was that Eddy would have someone who was unquestionably loyal to her.

Mary Baker Eddy in her later years

Gill wrote that the lawsuit originated with stories in the New York World (1860–1931), owned by Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911), that Eddy was sick and dying; the newspaper apparently paid for some of the plaintiffs' legal expenses. Four psychiatrists (then known as "alienists") were sent to Eddy's home to interview her as part of the proceedings. They concluded that she was mentally competent. One of them, Dr. Allan McLane Hamilton (1848–1919), told the New York Times that the attacks on Eddy were the result of "a spirit of religious persecution that has at last quite overreached itself."

In response to the stories in the New York World and McClure's, Eddy asked the Christian Science Publishing Society on August 8, 1908, to found the Christian Science Monitor as a platform for responsible journalism. It was published for the first time on November 25 that year, and went on to win seven Pulitzer Prizes between 1950 and 2002.

Eddy died two years later, on the evening of Saturday, December 3, 1910, aged 89. The first reader of the Mother Church in Boston announced the death at the end of the Sunday morning service, saying that Eddy had "passed from our sight." The church issued a statement reaffirming its belief that "the time will come when there will be no more death," but that Christian Scientists "do not look for [Mrs. Eddy's] return in this world." The church placed an armed guard outside her tomb at Mount Auburn cemetery, which triggered complaints from Christian Scientists who believed she would be resurrected. Her estate was valued at $1.5 million, most of which she left to the church.

Decline and reasons for the rise

Further information: List of former Christian Science churches, societies and buildings

	Christian Science practitioners (US) (Stark 1998)	Practitioners per million
1883	14	0.3
1887	110	1.9
1895	553	7.9
1911	3,280	34.9
1919	6,111	58.5
1930	9,722	79.0
1941	11,200	84.0
1945	9,823	70.2
1953	8,225	51.7
1972	5,848	28.0
1981	3,403	15.1
1995	1,820	6.9

A census at the height of the religion's popularity in 1936 counted nearly 270,000 Christian Scientists in the United States. The movement has been in decline ever since; Rodney Stark estimated that there were 106,000 Scientists in that country in 1990. He wrote in 1998 that it was uncertain whether Christian Science would survive another generation.

There were 1,271 Christian Science practitioners worldwide in 2014, against 11,200 in the United States in 1941; according to Stark clusters of the practitioners listed in the Christian Science Journal in 1998 were living in the same retirement communities. In 2009 the church announced that for the first time more new members had been admitted from Africa than from the United States. The church has sold church buildings to free up funds for congregations that could otherwise not continue.

Stark attributed the rise of the movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to several factors. It retained cultural continuity with Christianity, the native religion, by stressing that it was Christian and adopting its terms, despite the novel content Eddy introduced. It was not puritanical; members were expected not to drink or smoke but could otherwise do as they pleased, and several exceptions to the avoidance of medicine were permitted. It offered professional opportunities to women, as practitioners after just 12 lessons of study, who might otherwise have had none; 12 of the 14 practitioners listed in the first edition of Christian Science Journal were women. In 1906 72 percent of Christian Scientists in the United States were female, against 49 percent of the population, and similar percentages held true for 1926 and 1936.

The Fourth Church of Christ, Scientist, in San Francisco, was sold in 2009 to the Internet Archive.

The major factor in the rise of the movement was that medical practice was in its infancy; many physicians practiced little more than quackery and patients often fared better if left alone. Within that context Christian Science prayer compared favorably with medical care. The increased efficacy of medicine around the period of World War II heralded the religion's decline because Christian Science prayer began to perform poorly by comparison. Stark charts the use of sulfonamide to kill bacteria, the availability of penicillin in the 1940s and breakthroughs in immunology.

Other factors in the decline included increased opportunities for women to work outside the home, and that much of the membership was elderly; in 1998 30 percent were over 65. Eddy was over 60 herself by the time the movement became popular; Stark writes that the "characteristics of the earliest members of a movement will tend to be reproduced in subsequent converts."

A significant percentage of Scientists remained single, or became Scientists in later life when their children were adults and therefore unlikely to be converted; Eddy herself placed little emphasis on marriage and family. Christian Science did not have a missionary class that sought out new members, so it relied on internal growth, but the conversion rate within families was not high: in a study cited by Stark 26 of 80 people (33 percent) raised with Christian Science became Scientists themselves.

Practices and governance

Christian Science prayer

Practitioners, nursing homes

Christian Scientists certified by the church to charge for Christian Science prayer are called Christian Science practitioners. There were around 1,400 practitioners in the United States in 2010. Their training is much the same as it was in Eddy's day, a two-week, 12-lesson course called primary-class instruction, based on the 24 questions and answers in the Recapitulation chapter of Science and Health. Upon completion they can apply to be listed as practitioners in the Christian Science Journal.

Practitioners in the United States charge $25–$50 for a telephone or e-mail consultation, and more for house calls. Practitioners wanting to teach primary class themselves must take an additional six-day "normal class," which is held in Boston just once every three years.

Christian Science nursing homes have been run independently of the church since 1993, accredited by the Commission for Accreditation of Christian Science Nursing Organizations/Facilities. The homes offer no medical services; several are Medicare or Medicaid providers. The nurses are Christian Scientists who have completed a course of religious study and training in basic skills, such as feeding and bathing, in a Christian Science training center; no medical or nursing qualifications are required.

Prayers and testimonies

Further information: § Christian Science prayer: sickness as error

The aim of Christian Science prayer is to convince patients, or (from the perspective of Christian Science) help them understand, that they are not ill, and could not be ill, because there is no such thing as illness. They are, rather, the perfect ideas of Mind or God. A practitioner told the New York Times in 2010 that a patient with a lump under his arm is displaying a "manifestation of fear, not a lump." There is no laying on of hands; practitioners need not even be near the patient, but can act by telephone or e-mail, which they call "absent treatment." There are no set words or practices, and no appeal to God for help.

According to Robert Clark of the church's Committee on Publication for Florida, Christian Science prayer consists of "replacing ... fear and doubt with certainty of the divine presence in one's life. ... The process is really one of forsaking matter, and matter-based thinking, for spirit and spiritually-based knowing."

Fraser described Christian Science prayer as the practitioner silently arguing about the nature of reality. The practitioner might tell herself, "the allness of God using Eddy's seven synonyms – Life, Truth, Love, Spirit, Soul, Principle and Mind," then that "Spirit, Substance, is the only Mind, and man is its image and likeness; that Mind is intelligence; that Spirit is substance; that Love is wholeness; that Life, Truth, and Love are the only reality." She might continue by denying various ideas, including other religions, the existence of evil, mesmerism, astrology, numerology and the symptoms of whatever the illness is. She concludes, according to Fraser, by asserting that disease is a lie, that this is the word of God and that it has the power to heal.

The Christian Science Journal and Christian Science Sentinel publish anecdotal testimonies from adherents who say they were healed in this way. Published testimonies must be accompanied by statements from three verifiers, who are "people who know [the testifier] well and have either witnessed the healing or can vouch for [the testifier's] integrity in sharing it"; these statements are similarly anecdotal.

The church published 53,900 such testimonies between 1900 and April 1989, according to a church report, An Empirical Analysis of Medical Evidence in Christian Science Testimonies of Healing, 1969–1988. The study examined 10,000 reported healings from 1969–1988, 2,337 of which the church said had been medically diagnosed, and 623 of which were "medically confirmed by follow-up examinations." The report offered no evidence of the confirmation. The Massachusetts Committee for Children and Youth listed among the report's methodological flaws that it had failed to compare the rates of successful and unsuccessful Christian Science treatment. Philosopher Margaret P. Battin wrote that the seriousness with which the testimonies are treated by Christian Scientists ignores factors such as false positives caused by spontaneous recovery and self-limiting conditions. Because no negative accounts are published, the material feeds into people's tendency to over-rely on anecdotes when making decisions.

Children's rights

Religious exemptions

The main criticism Christian Science has faced is that adherents impose their ideas on their children, and by failing to provide access to medical care are denying them equal protection under the law. Children with disabilities and illnesses, or who are in pain, have been told there is nothing wrong with them apart from "incorrect" thinking. Fraser argues that this can undermine children's confidence in their own perceptions, and cause hypochondria by making them obsessed with their bodies in an effort to control their thoughts about them. In the case of very young children, parents have been told by practitioners that the illness must mainly be addressed in the parents thought. The church maintains that members are free to choose medical care, but several have said they fear being ostracized if they do. Nate Talbot, a past spokesperson for the Christian Science movement, objects to that view. "members of this denomination take community concerns about the well being of children with deep seriousness. They have a strong record of cooperation with public health officials over the years"

The Christian Science church in the United States has used the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, which guarantees the protection of religious practice, to persuade states to maintain religious-exemption statutes. After the conviction for manslaughter in 1967 of the Christian Scientist mother of five-year-old Lisa Sheridan, who died of pneumonia without medical care in Cape Code, Massachusetts, the church successfully lobbied the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) to add the following, in 1974, to the Code of Federal Regulations:

A parent or guardian legitimately practicing his religious beliefs who thereby does not provide specified medical treatment for a child, for that reason alone shall not be considered a negligent parent or guardian; however, such an exception shall not preclude a court from ordering that medical services be provided to the child, where his health requires it.

Only a dozen states had religious exemptions before this, but afterwards states were obliged to include one in child-neglect legislation or lose funding. The Christian Science church was either mentioned in the statutes or the wording made clear that the exemption referred to Christian Science. For example, the state of Washington religious exemption said as of March 2014: "It is the intent of the legislature that a person who, in good faith, is furnished Christian Science treatment by a duly accredited Christian Science practitioner in lieu of medical care is not considered deprived of medically necessary health care or abandoned."

Largely as a result of lobbying by Children's Healthcare is a Legal Duty, the government eliminated the HEW regulation in 1983, but 37 states, Guam and the District of Columbia still had religious-exemption statutes as of March 2014. Many of the exemptions say that in life-threatening situations children must be given access to medical care, but without early access to physicians the seriousness of an illness may not be recognized, in part because Christian Scientists are encouraged not to educate themselves about physical ailments.

Child deaths, prosecutions

In over 50 cases, from the prosecution of Abby Corner in 1888 to the early 1990s, prosecutors charged Christian Scientists after adults and children died of treatable illnesses without medical care. A study published in 1998 in Pediatrics examined 172 child deaths between 1975 and 1995 where parents had withheld medical care for religious reasons; 28 deaths involved Christian Science (this was the second highest number from a single group; the highest was the Faith Assembly with 64). Of the 172, all but three of the children would have benefited from medical care in the opinion of the authors, and 140 involved conditions where survival rates with medical treatment would have exceeded 90 percent.

Children's Healthcare is a Legal Duty was set up in 1983 by former Christian Scientists Rita and Douglas Swan.

In 1937 10-year-old Audrey Kay Whitney, a diabetic, died after her father left her with a Christian Scientist aunt in Chicago, who withdrew her insulin and took her to a practitioner. An attempt to prosecute the practitioner for manslaughter failed. (In 1959 the father approached the practitioner in his office and shot him three times; he was acquitted of attempted murder.) In 1955 seven-year-old David Cornelius also died after his insulin was withdrawn. His Christian Scientist parents were charged with manslaughter; the church hired a lawyer and the charges were dropped after the judge said the couple had held a "sincere belief in the inefficacy of medical treatment."

In March 1967 five-year-old Lisa Sheridan died of pneumonia in Cape Code, Massachusetts, after contracting strep throat; according to pediatrician Paul Offit she was found at autopsy to have two pints of pus in her chest that could have been removed. Her mother was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to five years' probation. In July 1977 16-month-old Matthew Swan died of bacterial meningitis in Detroit, Michigan, after his parents were persuaded by Christian Science practitioners not to take him to a physician; by the time they took him to hospital, the infection had caused irreversible brain damage. The parents, Douglas and Rita, responded by founding Children's Healthcare is a Legal Duty (CHILD).

Between 1980 and 1990 another seven Christian Scientist parents were prosecuted after their children died without medical care, three in California; two cases were dismissed and four resulted in convictions, two of which were later overturned. In June 1988 12-year-old Ashley King died in Phoenix, Arizona, after living for months with a tumor on her leg the size of a watermelon; her parents pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment. A prominent case in Massachusetts was Commonwealth v. Twitchell, which saw David and Ginger Twitchell convicted in 1990 of involuntary manslaughter after their two-year-old son, Robyn, died of peritonitis caused by a bowel obstruction. The conviction was overturned in 1993 when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the couple had "reasonably believed," based on a church publication they had read, that they could rely on Christian Science prayer without being prosecuted.

Lundman v. McKown

The first time the church was held liable in a wrongful death suit was in August 1993, when a Minnesota jury ordered it to pay damages to the father of 11-year-old Ian Lundman, who died in May 1989 as a consequence of undiagnosed diabetes. Although the award against the church was overturned, the case is regarded as important because the judgments against a Christian Science practitioner and nurse were upheld.

The boy had been ill for weeks, but when his condition worsened his mother sought help from a practitioner, a Christian Science nursing home and the church's Committee on Publication. The home sent a Christian Science nurse to sit with the boy, who was later deemed to have been in a diabetic coma; doctors testified that he could have been saved by an insulin injection up to two hours before his death. The nurse's notes were entered into evidence. The first entry noted that he was barely responsive; his breathing was labored and he was vomiting. She read hymns, rubbed his lips with Vaseline and tried to give him water. Over five hours later, 16 minutes before she wrote that he had stopped breathing, she wrote "passing possible."

The mother and stepfather were charged with manslaughter, but the charges were dismissed. The boy's father, Douglass Lundman, sued the mother, stepfather, practitioner, nurse, nursing home and the church. In August 1993 he was awarded $5.2 million compensatory damages divided between all the defendants, later reduced to $1.5 million, and $9 million in punitive damages against the church. The Minnesota State Court of Appeals upheld the judgment against the individuals in 1995, but overturned the award against the church and nursing home, finding that a judgment that forced the church to "abandon teaching its central tenet" was unconstitutional, and that, while the individuals had a duty of care toward the boy, the church and nursing home did not. Several of the parties appealed to the United States Supreme Court, but it declined to hear the case, and turned down an appeal by the father to reinstate the punitive damages against the church.

Avoidance of vaccination

Massachusetts made vaccination against smallpox compulsory for schoolchildren in 1855, and other states soon followed. Christian Scientists protested against the laws. A Christian Scientist in Wisconsin won a case in 1897 that allowed his unvaccinated son to attend public school, and several others were arrested in 1899 for avoiding vaccination during an epidemic in Georgia. In 1900 Eddy issued advice to adherents: "Rather than quarrel over vaccination I recommend that if the law demand an individual to submit to this process he obey the law and then appeal to the gospel to save him from any bad results." In 1902 she added that Christian Scientists should report contagious diseases to health boards when the law required it. Forty-eight states allowed religious exemptions to compulsory vaccination as of 2013.

There were at least four significant outbreaks of infectious diseases at Christian Science institutions between 1972 and 1994. In 1972 128 students at a Christian Science school in Greenwich, Connecticut, contracted polio and four were left partially paralyzed. In 1982 a nine-year-old girl died of diphtheria after attending a Christian Science camp in Colorado. In 1985 128 people were infected with measles, and three died, at Principia College, a Christian Science school in Elsah, Illinois. In 1994 190 people in six states were infected with measles traced to a child from a Christian Science family in Elsah.

Christian Science church

Governance, Manual of the Mother Church

The First Church of Christ, Scientist, the Mother Church, and its reflecting pool

The First Church of Christ, Scientist is headquartered in a 28-story building on its original site in Boston; the site covers 14 acres and includes a plaza with a 670-foot reflecting pool. The church is led by a president and five-person Board of Directors, and by the Committee on Publication (with representatives around the world), an institution Eddy set up in 1898 to protect her own and the church's reputation. The first church to be built in any city is named the First Church of Christ, Scientist; the next, the Second Church of Christ, Scientist, and so on (for example, the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, London). When a church closes the others are not renamed. Only the Mother Church in Boston uses the definite article in the title.

Eddy's Manual of The Mother Church (1895) lists 83 requirements and prohibitions for members. Requirements include daily study of the Bible and Science and Health. It also requires daily prayer; members are expected to say each day: "Thy kingdom come; let the reign of divine Truth, Life, and Love be established in me, and rule out of me all sin; and may Thy Word enrich the affections of all mankind, and govern them!"

They must subscribe to church periodicals if they can afford to, and pay an annual tax to the church of not less than one dollar. Prohibitions include joining other churches, publishing articles that are uncharitable toward religion, medicine, the law and courts, engaging in public debate or writing about Christian Science without board approval, engaging in mental malpractice, or visiting a book store that sells "obnoxious" books. It also includes "The Golden Rule": "A member of The Mother Church shall not haunt Mrs. Eddy’s drive when she goes out, continually stroll by her house, or make a summer resort near her for such a purpose."

Christian Science churches have no clergy, sermons or rituals, and perform no baptisms, marriages or burials; Eddy forbade the development of a church heirarchy apart from the Board of Directors and Committees on Publication. Readers select hymns and read aloud from Science and Health and the Bible. There are Sunday morning and evening services, Sunday schools, and meetings on Wednesday afternoons or evenings during which members offer testimonies; Wednesday meetings and Sunday schools are also offered online.

Mother Church with its administrative building on the left

The church began an ecumenical dialogue in the 2000s with mainstream Christian churches with a view to fostering closer relationships. In 2008 Michael Kinnamon, then general secretary of the National Council of Churches (NCC), invited Christian Scientists to visit the NCC governing board and join NCC commissions. According to Shirley Paulson, the church's Head of Ecumenical Affairs as of 2014, the stumbling blocks for better relationships are the "surface similarities" between Christian Science and gnosticism, and the church's rejection of medical care.

The organization has been accused at times of silencing internal criticism by firing staff, delisting practitioners and excommunicating members. Stephen Gottschalk – author of The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life (1973) and Rolling Away the Stone: Mary Baker Eddy's Challenge to Materialism (2005) – who worked for the church's Committee on Publication in Boston for 13 years, was forced out in 1990 after advising the board to be more accepting of internal criticism; by the end of the year, five of his associates had resigned or been fired, according to Caroline Fraser.

Notable members

Further information: List of Christian Scientists (religious denomination)

• 
  Val Kilmer
• 
  Mickey Rooney
• 
  Doris Day
• Ginger Rogers
  Ginger Rogers
• 
  Cecil B. DeMille
• 
  Robert Duvall

Christian Scientists have tended to be white and middle-class. Most have been women and, as of the 1990s, 42 percent had a college education. Notable Scientists have included two former Directors of Central Intelligence, William H. Webster and Admiral Stansfield M. Turner, as well as Richard Nixon's chief of staff H. R. Haldeman and Nixon's White House Counsel John Ehrlichman. Others include physicist Laurance Doyle and NASA astronaut Alan Shepard, Bill Bowerman, Co-founder of Nike, Henry Paulson, former Secretary of Treasury and in England the viscountess Nancy Astor and naval officer Charles Lightoller, the highest-ranking officer to survive the 1912 sinking of the Titanic.

• Also see Charles Lightoller, "It is difficult to tell of the experience ...", Christian Science Journal, October 1912. There used to be a concentration of Scientists in the film industry (see above).

Those raised within Christian Science include comedian Robin Williams, puppeteer Jim Henson, television host Ellen DeGeneres, musician James Hetfield, jurist Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, and actors Elizabeth Taylor, Henry Fonda, Audrey Hepburn and Anne Archer. Archer left Christian Science when her son, Tommy Davis, was a child; both became prominent in the Church of Scientology.

Publishing Society, The Destiny of The Mother Church

The Christian Science Publishing Society publishes several periodicals, including the Christian Science Monitor, a newspaper with a reputation for high-quality international news coverage. The winner of seven Pulitzer Prizes between 1950 and 2002, and numerous other awards, the Monitor had a daily circulation in 1970 of 220,000, which by 2008 had contracted to 52,000. It moved in 2009 to a largely online presence with a weekly print run. In the 1980s the church produced its own television programs, Christian Science Monitor Reports and World Monitor, and in 1991 founded the Monitor Channel, a 24-hour news channel, which closed with heavy losses after 13 months.

The Christian Science Publishing Society, Boston, MA

The church also publishes the weekly Christian Science Sentinel, the monthly Christian Science Journal, and the Herald of Christian Science, a non-English publication. In April 2012 JSH-Online made all back issues of the Journal, Sentinel and Herald available online to subscribers.

The church faced significant internal dissent in 1991 when the Publishing Society published The Destiny of The Mother Church, written decades earlier by Bliss Knapp (1877–1958), the son of two of Eddy's students. Knapp had been president of the Mother Church and a Christian Science practitioner. The book suggested that the Old and New Testaments had predicted Eddy's coming and that she was the Woman of the Apocalypse in the latter. Knapp had the book printed privately in 1947 but was anxious that it be church-authorized, so he and his family bequeathed $98-million to the church on condition that it publish the book by 1993; otherwise the money would go to Stanford University and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The church refused at least once after the bequest was set up, but agreed to publish the book in 1991, and made it available in Christian Science reading rooms; the other parties disputed that this constituted authorizing it and in the end the bequest was split three ways. In the view of some church members, the book tainted the religion's status as Christian and lent support to the view of it as a cult. A senior employee was fired for failing to support the church and 18 of the 21 editorial staff of the religious journals resigned.

Works by Mary Baker Eddy

• Science and Health (1875)
• The Science of Man, By Which the Sick are Healed (1876)
• Christian Healing (1880)
• The People's God (1883)
• Historical Sketches of Metaphysical Healing (1885)
• Defence of Christian Science (1885)
• No and Yes (1887)
• Rudiments and Rules of Divine Science (1887)
• Unity of Good and Unreality of Evil (1888)
• Retrospection and Introspection (1891)
• Rudimental Divine Science (1894)
• Manual of the Mother Church (1895)
• Pulpit and Press (1895)
• Miscellaneous Writings, 1883–1896 (1897)
• Christ and Christmas (1897)
• Christian Science versus Pantheism (1898)
• The Christian Science Hymnal (1898)
• Christian Healing and the People's Idea of God (1908)
• Poems (1910)
• The First Church of Christ Scientist and Miscellany (1913)
• Prose Works (1925)

• Second Church of Christ, Scientist, Los Angeles, CA
  Second Church of Christ, Scientist, Los Angeles, CA
• 
  Third Church of Christ, Scientist, London
• 
  First Church of Christ, Scientist, Ottawa
• 
  Christian Science Reading Room, Boston, MA
• 
  Christian Science Reading Room, Reading, England
• 
  Christian Science Reading Room, Lexington, MA
• 
  Mary Baker Eddy Library, Boston, MA
• 
  Mary Baker Eddy's home, Swampscott, MA
• 
  Mary Baker Eddy's home, Newton, MA
• 
  Mary Baker Eddy memorial, Mount Auburn Cemetery, Watertown, MA

See also

• Bone pointing / Voodoo death
• Efficacy of prayer
• Iatrogenesis
• Mind over matter
• Placebo effect / Nocebo
• Psychosomatic medicine
• Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905)
• Prince v. Massachusetts (1944)
• Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972)

References

News sources are listed only in the Notes section, unless used multiple times.

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Further reading

Christian Science resources

• Christian Science church
• Christian Science publications (Journal, Herald and Sentinel)
• Eddy, Mary Baker. Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, final edition.
• __________. Science and Health (1875), 1st edition (also here).
• __________. Manual of the Mother Church, 89th edition.
• Mary Baker Eddy Library, Christian Science church.
• Christian Science lectures.
• Emergence International, LGBT advocacy within Christian Science.
• Longyear Museum, devoted to the life and work of Mary Baker Eddy.
• The Bookmark, independent source of literature on Christian Science.
• Doyle, Laurance. "Science & Spirit: Where Do They Meet?" (lecture on Christian Science), Stanford University, May 6, 2008.

Articles, books

• Beasley, Norman. The Cross and the Crown, the History of Christian Science, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1952.
• Braden, Charles S. Spirits in Rebellion: The Rise and Development of New Thought, Southern Methodist University Press, 1963.
• New York Review of Books, reviews and replies about books by Caroline Fraser and Gillian Gill:

• Caroline Fraser, "Mrs. Eddy Builds Her Empire", July 11, 1996.
• M. Victor Westberg, reply by Caroline Fraser, "Christian Science: An Exchange", November 14, 1996.
• Caroline Fraser, "Overachiever" (review of Gillian Gill's Mary Baker Eddy), April 27, 2000.
• Gillian Gill, reply by Caroline Fraser, "Mrs. Eddy's Voices", June 29, 2000.
• Whitney Balliett, "Mad Genius" (review of Caroline Fraser's God's Perfect Child), September 21, 2000.
• Gary A. Jones and Stephen Gottschalk, reply by Whitney Balliett, "The Real Mrs. Eddy", January 11, 2001.

• Hoekema, Anthony A. The Four Major Cults: Christian Science, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormonism, Seventh-Day Adventism, Eerdmans, 1963.
• New York Times, The. "Mary Baker Eddy", archive of articles, 1899 to the present.
• May, Larry. "Challenging Medical Authority", in Peggy DesAutels, Margaret P. Battin, and Larry May (eds.), Praying for a Cure: When Medical and Religious Practices Conflict, Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.
• Merrick, J.C. "Christian Science healing of minor children", Issues Law Med, 10(3), Winter 1994, 321–342.
• Morris, Henry. "'Suggestion' in the treatment of disease", British Medical Journal, 1(2581), 1910 (discusses Christian Science, pp. 1462–1466).
• Ruetenik, Tadd. "The First Church of Christ, Pragmatist: Christian Science and Responsible Optimism", Journal of Religion and Health, 51(4), December 2012, pp. 1397–1405.
• Simpson, W. F. "Comparative Mortality of Two College Groups, 1945–1983", MMWR Weekly, 40(33), August 23, 1991, pp. 579–582.
• Swensen, Rolf. "A Metaphysical Rocket in Gotham: The Rise of Christian Science in New York City, 1885–1910", Journal of Religion and Society, 12, 2010.

Books by former Christian Scientists (chronological)

• Simmons, Thomas. The Unseen Shore: Memories of a Christian Science Childhood, Beacon 1991.
• Wilson, Barbara. Blue Windows: A Christian Science Childhood, Picador 1997.
• Fraser, Caroline. God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church, Metropolitan Books, 1999.
• Kramer, Linda S. The Religion That Kills: Christian Science: Abuse, Neglect, and Mind Control, Bookworld Services, 1999.
• Swan, Rita. The Last Strawberry, Hag's Head Press, 2009.
• Greenhouse, Lucy. fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science, Crown, 2011.

Biographies of Mary Baker Eddy (chronological)

• Cather, Willa and Milmine, Georgine. "Mary Baker G. Eddy", McClure's magazine, December 1906 – June 1908.
• Wilbur, Sybil. The Life of Mary Baker Eddy, The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1907.
• Meehan, Michael. Mrs. Eddy and the Late Suit in Equity, Ulan Press 2012, first published 1908.
• Cather, Willa and Milmine, Georgine. The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science, Doubleday 1909 (unz.org and archive.org).
• Bancroft, Samuel P. Mrs. Eddy as I Knew Her in 1870, Geo H. Ellis Co, 1923.
• Dickey, Adam H. Memoirs of Mary Baker Eddy, Bookmark 2002, first published 1927.
• Dakin, Edwin Franden. Mrs. Eddy, the Biography of a Virginal Mind, C. Scribner's Sons, 1929.
• Powell, Lyman P. Mary Baker Eddy: A Life Size Portrait, The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1930.
• Springer, Fleta Campbell. According to the Flesh, Coward-McCann, 1930.
• Bates, Ernest Sutherland and Dittemore, John V. Mary Baker Eddy: The Truth and the Tradition, A. A. Knopf, 1932.
• Tomlinson, Irving C. Twelve Years with Mary Baker Eddy, Christian Science Publishing Society, 1945.
• Studdert Kennedy, Hugh A. Mrs. Eddy: Her Life, Her Work and Her Place in History, Farallon Press, 1947.
• Peel, Robert. Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery, The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1966.
• Peel, Robert. Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial, The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1971.
• Peel, Robert. Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority, The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1977.
• Gardner, Martin. The Healing Revelations of Mary Baker Eddy, Prometheus Books, 1993.
• Thomas, David. With Bleeding Footsteps: Mary Baker Eddy's Path to Religious Leadership, Knopf 1994.
• Nenneman, Richard A. Persistent Pilgrim: The Life of Mary Baker Eddy, Nebbadoon Press, 1997.
• Gill, Gillian. Mary Baker Eddy, Da Capo Press, 1998.
• Gottschalk, Stephen. Rolling Away the Stone: Mary Baker Eddy's Challenge to Materialism, Indiana University Press, 2006.