SOURCE: "Mental Healer," in Famous American Books, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1971, pp. 147-54.

[In the following essay, Downs discusses Science and Health and Eddy's career.]

America has given the world two major religions—the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormonism, and the Church of Christ, Scientist, or Christian Science. The latter has the distinction of being the only religion founded by a woman.

Throughout the nineteenth century, during which both the Mormon and Christian Science churches were established, occult philosophies nourished. Nonconformist and Utopian movements attracted numerous adherents. Particularly appealing in the latter part of the century were such Oriental faiths as Vedanta, Baha'ism, Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, and Yoga, and there were churches of Divine Science, Religious Science, the Science of Mind, and New Thought.

In this highly charged atmosphere, so preoccupied with the supernatural and theological disputation, a new faith was born, Christian Science, destined for a permanence, vitality, and wide acceptance denied a majority of other sects of the era.

The founder of the Christian Science movement, Mary Baker Eddy, was a controversial figure for a major portion of her nearly ninety years of life and remained so after her death. From infancy she was an odd child, given to "fits," temper tantrums, and hysteria. Because of delicate health, she remained out of school for long periods, and thus most of what she learned was absorbed from books at home. Her mind was filled with religion at an unusually early age, and she could hear voices calling her name. At the age of twenty-two, Mary acquired the first of three husbands. None of the marriages was happy or successful, and Mary's poor health continued. When her spells of depression were most profound, and morphine failed to relieve pain, the family called in a local mesmerist, "Boston John" Clark. Mary, who was peculiarly suggestible, became fascinated with mesmerism—an omen of dungs to come—developed a habit of falling into trances, and began to receive messages from the dead.

The turning point in Mary Baker Eddy's life came at the age of forty, when she heard of Phineas P. Quimby, of Portland, Maine, a man who was reputed to effect miraculous cures through the use of hypnotism or mesmerism, rather than through orthodox medicine. Mary resolved at once to visit the new wonder worker, and secretly and alone she set off for Maine. Three weeks later, in a letter to the local Portland newspaper, she declared that through the great principle discovered by Dr. Quimby, who "speaks as never man spoke and heals as never man healed since Christ," she was well on the way to complete recovery of her health. Thereafter for the next several years she was an ardent disciple of Quimby. She read all his writings and continued to write letters to the newspapers extolling his work. The Quimby method, Mrs. Eddy insisted, did not resort to "animal magnetism," "electromagnetism," or hypnotism, but was based on a "science not understood." "I can see dimly the great principle which underlies Dr. Quimby's faith and works," she wrote, "the truth which he opposed to the error of giving intelligence to matter."

The essence of Quimby's teaching was to deny all evil and to affirm the reality and possession of all good. His system of mental suggestion is in accord with modern psychiatry. Quimby's fundamental premise was that suggestion would cure disease, and further, that all states of either health or disease were created solely by the mind. Carrying the idea further, it was held that a person would be affected physically by his own mind or by other minds; that is, that one mind could affect the life of another even from a remote distance. Finally, the theory is advanced that the mind creates all objective reality.

In later years violent controversy was to rage concerning Mrs. Eddy's debt to her teacher. At first she remained deeply loyal to Quimby and made extensive use in her own teaching of a Quimby manuscript entitled "The Science of Man." Gradually she lost her sense of dependence upon her tutor and convinced herself that the doctrines developed by him were original with herself. Most non-Christian Science writers believe that Mrs. Eddy derived at least the beginnings of her system of healing from Quimby, though all agree that she added significantly to his thought and even modified it substantially. The official Christian Science view, however, is that Quimby was merely a hypnotist, a mesmerist, making use of animal magnetism, and perhaps something of a charlatan, to whom Mrs. Eddy gave more than she received. If this were true, it is hardly probable that when Quimby died in 1866 Mary Baker Eddy would have written a commemorative poem, "Lines on the Death of Dr. P. P. Quimby, Who Healed with the Truth that Christ Taught in Contradistinction to All Isms."

Another turning point in Mrs. Eddy's career came a few weeks after Quimby's death. The event, generally recognized as marking the actual beginning of Christian Science, is thus described in the Lynn (Massachusetts) Reporter:

Mrs. Mary Patterson [later Mrs. Eddy], 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. Dr. Cushing who was called, found her injuries to be internal and of a severe nature, inducing spasms and internal suffering. She was removed to her home in Swampscott yesterday afternoon, though in a very critical condition.

The attending physician believed that his patient would never walk again, and possibly her injuries would prove fatal. It was then, Mrs. Eddy wrote, that "I discovered the science of divine metaphysical healing, which I named Christian Science." Opening a Bible by her bedside, her eyes chanced to fall upon an account of the healing of the palsied man by Jesus. The passage became a revelation to her, she arose from her bed, dressed, and walked into the parlor, to the astonishment of a group of friends gathered there. The marvelous experience of healing herself, of recovering from "an injury that neither medicine nor surgery could reach," according to Mrs. Eddy's autobiography published twenty-five years afterward, "was the falling apple that led me to the discovery how to be well myself and how to make others so." "During twenty years prior to my discovery," she continued, "I had been trying to trace all physical effects to a mental cause; and … I gained the scientific certainty that all causation was Mind, and every effect a mental phenomenon."

Mrs. Eddy was in her fiftieth year when the first draft was completed of the book which was to bring her fame and fortune. Three more years were spent in revisions before the volume appeared in print in 1875, a 456-page work. Quimby had called his method the "Science of Health;" Mrs. Eddy entitled her book Science and Health, later adding a subtitle, With Key to the Scriptures. Two devoted students agreed to provide a subsidy of 1,500 dollars demanded by the publisher.

The first edition of Science and Health consisted of 1,000 copies, cheaply bound, crudely printed, and full of typographical errors. Today it is one of the rarest books in the world, for only a handful of copies survive; the remainder have been systematically destroyed. In his Mental Healers, Stefan Zweig suggests that "this almost unobtainable version, the only one that was exclusively Mary Baker's work and was untouched by any editorial hand, is essential to the psychological understanding of the book and its author, for none of the very numerous subsequent editions have more than a trace of the primitive and barbaric charm of the original. In later editions many of the wildest tilts against reason, many of the crudest historical and philosophical blunders, have been expunged by better-educated advisers." The text was completely reworked by a retired minister, James Henry Wiggin, who turned out to be an excellent editor.

Successive editions of Science and Health were subjected by Mrs. Eddy to rearrangements of chapters, partly in a search for some logical order in the text and in part for financial reasons, since members of the church were expected to purchase the latest edition. The headings in the first edition read as follows: "Natural Science," "Imposition and Demonstration," "Spirit and Matter," "Creation," "Prayer and Atonement," "Marriage," "Physiology," and "Healing the Sick." The last edition is arranged under these chapter titles: "Prayer," "Atonement and Eucharist," "Marriage," "Christian Science versus Spiritualism," "Animal Magnetism Unmasked," "Science," "Theology," "Medicine," "Physiology," "Footsteps of Truth," "Creation," "Science of Being," "Some Objections Answered," "Christian Science Practice," "Teaching Christian Science," and "Recapitulation." Two Eddy biographers, Bates and Dittemore, conclude that after all Mrs. Eddy's efforts, "the arrangement of chapters in the last edition is less logical than that of the first," since in its original form the book began with an exposition of general metaphysical principles, followed later by specific application, whereas the final version scatters the discussion of general principles among a number of chapters near the end.

Christian Science as a system of healing had one great improvement over Quimby's doctrine—it was a theology, not merely a method of healing. As stated by Mrs. Eddy's biographer, Dakin,

The main thesis of Science and Health, stripped of its contradictions, develops the conviction that Christ came to redeem men not merely from sin but also from sickness and death; that his methods are applicable to a modern age; that all men can heal both themselves and others if they develop the correct Christ consciousness, and this long lost Christ-art was again revealed to mankind in the instruction from Mary Baker Eddy.

The one basic thought is the "unity of God and unreality of evil." In brief, nothing exists but God, and if God is good there can be no evil. Therefore pain and illness may appear to exist, but in reality are due entirely to the "error" of the human senses.

In further elucidation of the doctrine, Mrs. Eddy declares, "The chief stones in the temple of Christian Science are to be found in the following postulates: that Life is God, good, and not evil; that Soul is sinless, not to be found in the body; that Spirit is not, and cannot be, materialized; that life is not subject to death; that the spiritual real man has no birth, no material life, and no death." In making theology serve as a therapy, Mrs. Eddy was convinced that she had discovered and revealed a hitherto-unknown means of divine healing. Man can be troubled by illness, old age, and infirmity only so long as he remains under the delusion that illness and old age exist. The idea that man may be attacked by physical infirmities is rejected by Mrs. Eddy with the declaration that "God never made a man sick."

Mrs. Eddy's adamant belief in the unreality of matter is difficult for those not philosophically inclined to grasp. In this concept, she departed radically from such predecessors as Mesmer and Quimby, who accepted the fact that they were treating material human bodies and attempted to relieve the suffering of their patients by animal magnetism, hypnosis, mental suggestion, or similar devices. But Mrs. Eddy insisted that "man is not matter, he is the composed idea of God"; we merely dream that we have bodies, and man's earthly existence is nothing more than a "dream of life in matter." Though there seems to be no evidence that she was a student of Hinduism or ever read the basic Hindu sacred texts, the whole idea of the unreality of matter could have been taken directly from those sources. As Charles S. Braden, in These Also Believe, observes:

The closest approximation to the thought of Mrs. Eddy is to be found in the Hindu concept of the one Real, and the illusory character of all else. So, also, her fundamental denial of the reality of evil and suffering is an almost exact restatement of one phase of Hindu thought.

The prevention and cure of illness are only one side of Christian Science, but they are the aspect that looms largest in public consciousness. How authentic are the claims of the Christian Science practitioners to having been responsible for innumerable miraculous recoveries? Braden, a nonmember, concedes: "There can be no doubt that myriads of people have been healed and have stayed well, thanks to the help of Christian Science." Mrs. Eddy herself maintained that she had cured consumption, cancer, and diphtheria, restored sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, speech to the dumb, made the lame walk, and caused an eighty-five-year-old woman to grow new teeth. In an appendix to the version of Science and Health in current use, entitled "Fruitage," 100 pages are devoted to letters testifying to cures wrought through Christian Science for rheumatism, hernia, tumors, cataracts, heart disease, cancer, Bright's disease, dyspepsia, deafness, rupture, dropsy, kidney disease, eczema, asthma, and a variety of other ailments.

In few instances where remarkable cures have been claimed were there any expert diagnoses of the diseases or objective reports on the results of the treatments. It is also certain that delays among Christian Scientists in seeking medical advice in the early stages of diseases have not infrequently proved fatal. But in situations where applicable, the combination of religious emotionalism and applied psychology in Christian Science have achieved near miracles, especially in mentally disturbed patients. As Dakin points out in his biography of Mrs. Eddy:

Human experience has tended to indicate, over a long period of years, that the force called suggestion is particularly effective when a state of high religious exaltation can be induced in the subject. Healing through suggestion has been associated with religious ecstasy as far back as there is a record of human history; and modern psychologists and psychiatrists have not been slow to recognize evidence of some important relationship between these two forces.

Christian Scientists are quick to deny, however, that their doctrine is based on mental healing, as practiced by others. "On the contrary," in Mrs. Eddy's words, "the physical healing of Christian Science results now, as in Jesus' time, from the operation of divine Principle, before which sin and disease lose their reality in human consciousness and disappear as naturally and as necessarily as darkness gives place to light and sin to reformation."

In The Doctors' Dilemmas, Louis Lasagna reports on a twenty-year study of deaths of Christian Scientists in the Pacific Northwest area. The average age at death was found to be slightly below the average for the state of Washington; no deaths from homicide or suicide occurred; the incidence of pneumonia did not differ from non-Christian Scientists, but malignant disease was much more common among Christian Scientists; diabetes as a cause of death in Christian Scientists was in excess of the national average, and the incidence of tuberculosis was significantly higher; deaths from automobile accidents and accidental falls, however, were almost nonexistent in the Christian Science group.

A phase of Christian Science not mentioned in the first edition of Science and Health, but featured forcefully in the second and later versions, was a belief in mental malpractice, identified as "malicious animal magnetism," a mental influence which evil-minded persons could exert, to produce disease or misfortune in others. Such absent mesmerism could make another person sick, if the mesmerist so desired. Mrs. Eddy attributed the ills and difficulties in her own career to "M.A.M.," or the mental malpractice of some of her enemies, and in her writings and in several lawsuits she repeatedly demanded that the courts take cognizance of the crime of mesmeric influence. The death of her third husband in 1882 was blamed by Mrs. Eddy on malicious magnetism. To counteract this baleful influence a method of treatment was devised whereby a group of Mrs. Eddy's friends would gather around and set their minds to warding off the evil feared or anticipated.

The first organization to support the new faith, established in 1876 by an informal group of students, was "The Christian Scientists' Association." Three years later a charter was obtained for "The Church of Christ, Scientist." It is contrary to the church's rules to publish statistics of membership, though in 1901 Mrs. Eddy challenged a critic of her work to match a record which "could start thirty years without a Christian Scientist on earth, and in this interval number one million." On the other hand, writing as late as 1949, Braden concluded that "the total world membership would be certainly not more than 375,000." According to the most recent statistics available, there are more than 3,200 branches of the Mother Church in Boston in some forty-five countries, as well as 278 Christian Science organizations at colleges and universities. In any case, the doctrine that traces physical effect to a mental cause and asserts that the power of prayer and belief will deliver one from sickness has had an influence out of all proportion to the church's actual membership. The whole field of medicine and surgery has felt its impact, as the mental factor in disease receives increased attention from medical schools and practitioners.

An excellent summation of Mary Baker Eddy's extraordinary career appears in Zweig's Mental Healers:

In twenty years out of a maze of metaphysical confusion she created a new method of healing; established a doctrine counting its adherents by the myriad, with colleges and periodicals of its own, and promulgated in textbooks credited with inspiration; established a Church and built numerous churches; appointed a sanhedrin of preachers and priests; and won for herself private wealth amounting to three million dollars. Over and above all this, by her very exaggerations she gave contemporary psychology a vigorous forward thrust, and ensured for herself a special page in the history of mental science.