Mary Baker Eddy

Bow, New Hampshire

Family

Eddy was born Mary Morse Baker on July 16, 1821, in a farmhouse in Bow, New Hampshire to farmer Mark Baker (d. 1865) and his wife Abigail Barnard Baker, née Ambrose (d. 1849). Eddy was the youngest of six children: boys Samuel Dow (1808), Albert (1810), and George Sullivan (1812), followed by girls Abigail Barnard (1816), Martha Smith (1819), and Mary Morse (1821).^[3][4] She was the cousin of U.S. Representative Henry M. Baker.^[5]

She was the sixth generation of her family born in the United States.^[6][4] The farmhouse she was born in was built by her grandfather, Joseph Baker Jr., on a tract of land his maternal grandfather, Captain John Lovewell, had been given for service in the American Revolutionary War. Eddy's father Mark inherited the farm alongside his elder brother James when Joseph Jr. died in 1816.^[7]

A staunch Calvinist, Mark Baker was an active member of the Tilton Congregationalist Church.^[4][8] McClure's reported he had a reputation for holding strong opinions and quarreling with those he disagreed with; one neighbor described him as "[a] tiger for a temper and always in a row."^[9] They also stated he was an ardent supporter of slavery and a Copperhead who was reportedly pleased to hear about Abraham Lincoln's death.^[10] Despite trying to oust his Republican pastor during the war alongside a faction of his church, he refused to leave the church alongside other members of the faction when they failed. Instead, he continued to attend services, but would storm out at the mention of the American Civil War during a service.^[11]

Eddy and her father reportedly had a volatile relationship. Ernest Sutherland Bates and John V. Dittemore wrote in 1932 that Baker sought to break Eddy's will with harsh punishment, although her mother often intervened;^[12] in contrast to the strict religiosity of her father, Eddy's mother was described as devout, quiet, light-hearted and nurturing, and a benevolent spiritual influence on Eddy in her formative years.^[12][13]

Tilton, New Hampshire

In 1836, when Eddy was about 14 to 15 years old, she moved with her family to the town of Sanbornton Bridge, New Hampshire, approximately twenty miles (32 km) north of Bow. Sanbornton Bridge was renamed in 1869 as Tilton, New Hampshire.^[18]

Ernest Bates and John Dittemore write that Eddy was not able to attend Sanbornton Academy when the family first moved there but was required instead to start at the district school (in the same building) with the youngest girls. She withdrew after a month because of poor health, then received private tuition from the Reverend Enoch Corser. She entered Sanbornton Academy in 1842.^[19]

She was received into the Congregational church in Tilton on July 26, 1838, when she was 17, according to church records published by Cather and Milmine. Eddy had written in her autobiography in 1891 that she was 12 when this happened, and that she had discussed the idea of predestination with the pastor during the examination for her membership; this may have been an attempt to mirror the story of a 12-year-old Jesus in the Temple.^[20]

Marriage, widowhood

Eddy was badly affected by four deaths in the 1840s.^[21] She regarded her brother Albert as a teacher and mentor, but he died in 1841. In 1844, her first husband George Washington Glover (a friend of her brother Samuel) died after six months of marriage. They had married in December 1843 and set up home in Charleston, South Carolina, where Glover worked as a builder, but he died of yellow fever in June 1844 while living in Wilmington, North Carolina. According to Eddy, she had freed her husband's slaves upon his death, but according to Caroline Fraser there is no evidence Glover was ever a slave owner.^[22]

When Glover died, Eddy was with him in Wilmington, six months pregnant. She had to make her way back to New Hampshire, 1,400 miles (2,300 km) by train and steamboat, where her only child George Washington Glover II (1844 - 1915) was born on September 12 in her father's home.^[23][24] Her husband's death, the journey back, and the birth left her physically and mentally exhausted, and she ended up bedridden for months.^[25] Her son was nursed by a local woman while Eddy herself was cared for by Mahala Sanborn, a household servant.^[26]

Eddy's mother died in November 1849. Her mother's death was then followed three weeks later by the death of Eddy's fiancé, lawyer John Bartlett.^[27] Eddy's father Mark Baker remarried in 1850; his second wife Elizabeth Patterson Duncan (d. June 6, 1875) had been widowed twice, and had some property and income from her second marriage.^[28]

Baker apparently made clear to Eddy that her son would not be welcome in the new marital home.^[29] In 1851, George Washington Glover II was sent to live permanently with Mahala Sanborn in New Hampshire, which Eddy would later attribute to a plot to separate her from her child.^[30]

There is some controversy over Eddy's relationship with her son, with Peel attributing Eddy sending George away to him being a demanding baby and intemperate child,^[31] while more critical biographers such as Fraser and Martin Gardner have written that Eddy "lacked affection" for her child,^[32] and was either unable or unwilling to care for him, Fraser writing that despite expressing grief over her son's absence "no evidence has been found to support the sympathetic assumption that Mary Glover yearned to regain custody of her son."^[33]

Eddy married Dr. Daniel Patterson, a dentist who also practiced homeopathy,^[34] in 1853.^[33] Their marriage was an unhappy one, with Patterson frequently traveling to find work leaving his chronically ill wife at home in North Groton, where the couple had moved.^[35] While bedridden, she owned a scrapbook in which she collected various newspaper clippings, recipes, remedies and other texts which she labeled "Gems of Truth" and "Dewdrops of Wisdom", and prescribed homeopathic cures to her neighbors. ^[36] In 1859, the Patterson couple was evicted, and moved into a boarding house in Rumney, New Hampshire. ^[36] In 1862, during the American Civil War, Patterson was tasked with delivering money to the front, but was captured at Bull Run and imprisoned, managing to escape but increasingly abandoning his wife.^[37]

Study with Phineas Quimby

Mesmerism had become popular in New England; and on October 14, 1861, Patterson, wrote to mesmerist Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, who reportedly cured people without medicine, asking if he could cure his wife.^[38] Quimby replied that he had too much work in Portland, Maine and that he could not visit her, but if Patterson brought his wife to him he would treat her.^[39] Eddy did not immediately go, instead trying the water cure at Dr. Vail's Hydropathic Institute, but was dissatisfied by the treatment she received.^[40][41] A year later, in October 1862, Eddy first visited Quimby.^[42] She improved considerably, and publicly declared that she had been able to walk up 182 steps to the dome of city hall after a week of treatment.^[43] In November 1862, Eddy wrote a letter to the Portland Evening Courier praising Quimby, while denying he practiced "spiritualism" or "animal magnetism". ^[40] The cures were temporary, however, and Eddy soon suffered relapses.^[44]

Despite the temporary nature of the "cure", she attached religious significance to it, which Quimby did not.^[45] Eddy believed that it was the same type of healing performed by Christ Jesus, who, unlike Quimby, administered no medicine or material means in his healings.^[46] From 1862 to 1865, Quimby and Eddy engaged in lengthy discussions about healing methods like hydropathy practiced by Quimby and others.^[47] She took notes on her own views of healing, as well as writing dictations from him and "correcting" them with her own ideas, some of which according to Church of Christ, Scientist historian Robert Peel possibly ended up in the "Quimby manuscripts" that were published later and attributed to him.^[48][49] According to Caroline Fraser however, "there is no evidence that the Quimby manuscripts contain ideas or language that came from anybody but Quimby", who provided inspiration for much of Eddy's later teachings. ^[50] H.A.L. Fisher writes that despite Quimby not being especially religious, he embraced the religious connotations Eddy was bringing to his work since he knew his more religious patients would appreciate it.^[51] Gardner notes however that Quimby was a "deeply religious man", who believed his methods of healing were the same as those of Jesus Christ,^[52] which he referred to in an unpublished 1863 article as "Christian Science".^[53][54] Phineas Quimby died on January 16, 1866, shortly after Eddy's father.^[a]

Caroline Fraser has written that while Eddy did not plagiarize Quimby, she was "indebted to Quimby for the basic concepts and language of mind healing". ^[50] Martin Gardner also notes "her great debt to Quimby",^[53] which according to him Eddy tried to downplay in later years to emphasize Christian Science as her own divinely inspired discovery.^[56] J. Gordon Melton has argued "certainly Eddy shared some ideas with Quimby. She differed with him in some key areas, however, such as specific healing techniques. Moreover, she did not share Quimby's hostility toward the Bible and Christianity."^[57] Biographer Gillian Gill has disagreed with other scholars arguing they "have flouted the evidence and shown willful bias in accusing Mrs. Eddy of owing her theory of healing to Quimby and of plagiarizing his unpublished work",^[58] while stating that "this does not mean that Quimby did not have a profound influence on her."^[47]

1866 fall

On February 1, 1866, while living in Swampscott, Massachusetts, Eddy slipped and fell on a patch of ice. A contemporary account by the Lynn Reporter stated:^[59]

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. 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.

When Georgine Milmine interviewed Dr. Cushing forty years later, he stated that his records from the time documented that Eddy was in a "semi-hysterical" intense emotional state which subsided after she was given a small amount of morphine.^[59] According to Cushing in an affidavit, he "did not at any time declare, or believe, that there was no hope for Mrs. Patterson's recovery".^[60]

On February 14, 1866, the day after Eddy finished her care with Dr. Cushing, Eddy wrote to Julius Dresser, another patient of Phineas Quimby, stating that her injury and her subsequent medical care had undone all of the healing that Quimby had done before, and requested that he heal her. Dresser refused, stating that he was not enough to take on the burden of healing, and urged Eddy to instead spread Quimby's teachings further. Eddy would later credit her accident as her moment of spiritual revelation and the "falling apple" that led to her discovery of Christian Science. She stated that after rejecting the medicines offered to her by her doctor, she opened her Bible three days after her fall and returned to full health after reading of Jesus healing the sick.^[61]

A few months after Eddy's accident, Patterson abandoned her, leaving Eddy destitute and dependent on occasional payments from Patterson and the generosity of friends and moving eight times around the Boston area that year.^[62]

Spiritualism

Eddy separated from her second husband Daniel Patterson in 1866, after which she boarded for four years with several families in Lynn, Massachusetts and elsewhere. Frank Podmore wrote:

But she was never able to stay long in one family. She quarrelled successively with all her hostesses, and her departure from the house was heralded on two or three occasions by a violent scene. Her friends during these years were generally Spiritualists; she seems to have professed herself a Spiritualist, and to have taken part in séances. She was occasionally entranced, and had received "spirit communications" from her deceased brother Albert. Her first advertisement as a healer appeared in 1868, in the Spiritualist paper The Banner of Light. During these years she carried about with her a copy of one of Quimby's manuscripts giving an abstract of his philosophy. This manuscript she permitted some of her pupils to copy.^[63]

According to Church of Christ, Scientist historian Peel, spiritualists were "eager to claim her as one of their own."^[64] After she became well known, reports surfaced that Eddy had been a medium years earlier in Boston and St. Louis,^[64] though according to Peel at the time when she was said to be a medium there, she lived some distance away in North Groton, where she was reportedly bedridden.^[64][65] According to Gill, Eddy knew spiritualists and took part in some of their activities, but was never a convinced believer.^[66] For example, she visited her friend Sarah Crosby in 1864, who believed in Spiritualism. According to Sibyl Wilbur, a biographer sympathetic to Eddy,^[67] Eddy attempted to show Crosby the folly of it by pretending to channel Eddy's dead brother Albert and writing letters which she attributed to him.^[68] In regard to the deception, biographer Hugh Evelyn Wortham stated "Mrs. Eddy's followers explain it all as a pleasantry on her part to cure Mrs. Crosby of her credulous belief in spiritualism."^[69] However, Martin Gardner has argued against this, stating that Eddy was working as a spiritualist medium and was convinced by the messages. According to Gardner, Eddy's mediumship converted Crosby to Spiritualism.^[32]

In one of her spiritualist trances to Crosby, Eddy gave a message that was supportive of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, stating "P. Quimby of Portland has the spiritual truth of diseases. You must imbibe it to be healed. Go to him again and lean on no material or spiritual medium."^[70][71] The paragraph that included this quote was later omitted from an official sanctioned biography of Eddy.^[71]

Between 1867 and 1868, Eddy boarded at the home of Brene Paine Clark who was interested in Spiritualism.^[72][73] Seances were often conducted there, but according to Gill Eddy and Clark engaged in arguments about them.^[74] According to Cather and Milmine, Richard Hazeltine attended seances at Clark's home, and Eddy had acted as a trance medium, stating she was channeling the spirits of the Apostles.^[75] According to Gill, Eddy's arguments against Spiritualism convinced at least one other who was there at the time—Hiram Crafts—that "her science was far superior to spirit teachings."^[76] Crafts became the first of Eddy's students, until the two had a falling out over either finances or Eddy asking Crafts to divorce his wife.^[77]

Mary Gould, a Spiritualist from Lynn, stated that one of the spirits that Eddy channeled was Abraham Lincoln. According to eyewitness reports cited by Cather and Milmine, Eddy was still attending séances as late as 1872.^[75][78] In these later séances, Eddy would attempt to convert her audience into accepting Christian Science.^[79] Eddy showed extensive familiarity with Spiritualist practice,^[80][81] but she denounced it in later Christian Science writings.^[82] Historian Ann Braude wrote that there were similarities between Spiritualism and Christian Science, but the main difference was that Eddy came to believe, after she founded Christian Science, that spirit manifestations had never really had bodies to begin with, because matter is unreal and that all that really exists is spirit, before and after death.^[83]

In the fiftieth edition of her book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, published in 1891, Eddy added the chapter, Christian Science and Spiritualism. This chapter was renamed in 1910 to Christian Science versus Spiritualism.^[84]

Malicious animal magnetism

According to Eddy, the opposite of Christian Science mental healing was the use of mental powers for destructive or selfish reasons – for which she used terms such as animal magnetism, hypnotism, or mesmerism interchangeably.^[147] "Malicious animal magnetism", sometimes abbreviated as M.A.M., is what Catherine Albanese called "a Calvinist devil lurking beneath the metaphysical surface".^[148] As there is no personal devil or evil in Christian Science, M.A.M., or mesmerism became the explanation for the problem of evil.^[149][150] Eddy was concerned that a new practitioner could inadvertently harm a patient through unenlightened use of their mental powers, and that less scrupulous individuals could use them as a weapon.^[151]

Animal magnetism became one of the most controversial aspects of Eddy's life. The McClure's biography spends a significant amount of time on malicious animal magnetism, which it uses to make the case that Eddy had paranoia.^[152] During the Next Friends lawsuit, it was used to charge Eddy with incompetence and "general insanity".^[153]

According to Gillian Gill, Eddy's experience with Richard Kennedy, one of her early students, was what led her to begin her examination of malicious animal magnetism.^[154]

In 1882, Eddy publicly stated that her last husband, Asa Gilbert Eddy, had died of "mental assassination".^[155] Daniel Spofford was another Christian Scientist expelled by Eddy after she accused him of practicing malicious animal magnetism.^[156] This gained notoriety in a case irreverently dubbed the "Second Salem Witch Trial".^[157]

At her Pleasant View estate near Concord, New Hampshire, Eddy set up "watches" for her staff to pray about challenges facing the Christian Science movement and to handle animal magnetism that arose.^[158] Gill writes that Eddy got the term from the New Testament account of the garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus chastises his disciples for being unable to "watch" even for a short time; and that Eddy used it to refer to "a particularly vigilant and active form of prayer, a set period of time when specific people would put their thoughts toward God, review questions and problems of the day, and seek spiritual understanding."^[158] Cooks at Pleasant View often had to prepare two meals for Eddy's dinner, in case the first meal was contaminated by animal magnetism,^[159] and animal magnetism routinely caused Eddy's dresses not to fit well enough or to have wrinkles according to her.^[160] Critics such as Georgine Milmine in Mclure's, Edwin Dakin, and John Dittemore, say this was evidence that Eddy had a great fear of malicious animal magnetism; although Gilbert Carpenter, one of Eddy's staff at the time, insisted she was not fearful of it, and that she was simply being vigilant.^[158]

According to Gill, as time went on, Eddy tried to publicly lessen the focus on animal magnetism within the movement, and she worked to clearly define it as unreality, which only had power if one conceded to it.^[161] Nonetheless, it continued to play an important role in the teaching of Christian Science,^[162] and her fear of malicious animal magnetism would profoundly influence her private life.^[163]

The belief in malicious animal magnetism remains a part of Christian Science doctrine.^[164][165] Christian Scientists use it as a specific term for a hypnotic belief in a power apart from God.^[166]

Hinduism, Buddhism, or other Eastern religions

There is some debate on the possible influence of Hinduism, Buddhism, or other Eastern religions on Eddy and her work.^{[167][168][169]} The 33rd edition of Science and Health referenced the Bhagavad Gita, which according to Gillian Gill was likely added by James Henry Wiggin, who worked as an editor for Eddy; however Eddy removed all references to Eastern religions in 1891.^{[170][171][169]} According to Christian Science historian Stephen Gottschalk, Eddy consciously distinguished Christian Science from Eastern religions starting in the mid-1880s.^[172] According to Claire Badaracco, "Eddy knew little about" these religions.^[168] Damodar Singhal, however, believes that there were the "echoes" of Vedanta in her work, whether Eddy was directly influenced by Hindu philosophy or not.^[173]

British Israelism

Eddy was introduced to British Israelism by Julia Field-King, who herself was introduced by the writings of C. A. L. Totten. Totten allegedly traced Queen Victoria's genealogy to King David, and Field-King offered to create a genealogy tracing Eddy to King David. Eddy eventually requested that Field-King cease work on the genealogy and transferred her to London to expand the church there.^[174] Since her death, academics have debated the extent of Eddy's relationship with British Israelism with Church of Christ, Scientist historian Robert Peel arguing she was "intrigued by the theory for several years," while keeping "it resolutely out of her work and her writing on Christian Science." He acknowledges she uses the term "Anglo-Israel" in one poem, but argues the meaning is "metaphorical" instead of "ethnic or historical."^[175]

Political Scientist Michael Barkun argued that "Eddy continued to maintain an interest in British-Israelism, although she kept it out of her doctrinal writings" and noted that a "schismatic offshoot" organized by Annie Cecelia Bill in England after Eddy's death centered on British-Israelism.^[176] Professor of religious studies John K. Simmons, citing Peel, argued that Eddy "gave the theory no real credence, at least in verifiable written form," but acknowledged British-Israelism "seemed to attract the turn-of-the-century metaphysical crowd."^[177]

Use of medicine

In Science and Health, Eddy established the principle of "radical reliance", which implied that Christian Scientists should fully eschew medicine in favor of Eddy's methods, stating that "on this fundamental point, timid conservatism is absolutely inadmissible. Only through radical reliance on Truth can scientific healing power be realized."^[181] However, as Eddy's use of medicine became public, she had to reconcile this with her doctrines, formulating several exceptions to the principle of radical reliance.^[181] On December 2, 1900, the Boston Herald reported on a lecture at the Episcopal Congress in Boston where Eddy was criticized for stating that she was able to cure bone diseases despite having gone to a dentist to have teeth pulled, to which Eddy responded in the same issue.^[181] Shortly thereafter, Eddy publicly announced that Christian Scientists would be allowed to visit dentists, a policy which remains to this day.^[182]

In 1905, Eddy wrote in a new edition of Science and Health that allowed Christian Scientists afflicted by severe pain which they were not able to treat themselves to "call a surgeon, who would give him a hypodermic injection", following bouts of severe pain as a result of kidney stones.^[183] There is controversy about how much Eddy used morphine. Biographers Ernest Sutherland Bates and Edwin Franden Dakin described Eddy as a morphine addict.^[184] Miranda Rice, a friend and close student of Eddy, told a newspaper in 1906: "I know that Mrs. Eddy was addicted to morphine in the seventies."^[185] A diary kept by Calvin Frye, Eddy's personal secretary, suggests that Eddy occasionally reverted to "the old morphine habit" when she was in pain.^[186] Gill writes that the prescription of morphine was normal medical practice at the time, and that "I remain convinced that Mary Baker Eddy was never addicted to morphine."^[187]

Eddy recommended to her son that, rather than go against the law of the state, he should have her grandchildren vaccinated. She also paid for a mastectomy for her sister-in-law.^[188] Eddy used glasses for several years for very fine print, but later said she had dispensed with them almost entirely and could read fine print with ease.^[189][190] In 1907, Arthur Brisbane interviewed Eddy. At one point, he picked up a periodical, selected a paragraph at random, and asked Eddy to read it. According to Brisbane, at the age of eighty-six, she read the ordinary magazine type without glasses.^[191] Towards the end of her life, she was frequently attended by physicians.^[192]

Next Friends lawsuit

In her final years, Eddy became increasingly reclusive, with sources differing on her physical state and to what extent she remained lucid during this period, which led to frequent, often embellished, rumors in the press about Eddy's behavior and well-being.^[193] In 1906, the New York World had run a story falsely asserting that Eddy was dying of cancer, with her household and finances under the control of Calvin Frye.^[194] A year later, the newspaper sponsored a lawsuit, known as "The Next Friends suit", which journalist Erwin Canham described as "designed to wrest from [Eddy] and her trusted officials all control of her church and its activities."^[195]

During the course of the legal case, four psychiatrists interviewed Eddy, then 86 years old, to determine whether she could manage her own affairs, and concluded that she was able to.^[196] Physician Allan McLane Hamilton 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", and that "there seems to be a manifest injustice in taxing so excellent and capable an old lady as Mrs. Eddy with any form of insanity."^[197]

A 1907 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association noted that Eddy exhibited hysterical and psychotic behavior.^[198] Psychiatrist Karl Menninger, in his book The Human Mind (1927), cited Eddy's paranoid delusions about malicious animal magnetism as an example of a "schizoid personality".^[199] Psychologists Leon Joseph Saul and Silas L. Warner, in their book The Psychotic Personality (1982), concluded that Eddy had diagnostic characteristics of psychotic personality disorder (PPD).^[200] In 1983, psychologists Theodore Barber and Sheryl C. Wilson suggested that Eddy displayed traits of a fantasy prone personality.^[201] Psychiatrist George Eman Vaillant wrote that Eddy was hypochondriacal.^[202] Psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel has written that Eddy's lifelong secret morphine habit contributed to her development of "progressive paranoia".^[203]

Final years and death

In 1908, concerned that her Pleasant View estate,^[204] as well as the state of New Hampshire were contaminated with malicious animal magnetism, Eddy moved in secrecy to Chestnut Hill in Massachusetts. ^[205]

Eddy died of pneumonia on the evening of December 3, 1910, at her home at 400 Beacon Street, in the Chestnut Hill section of Newton, Massachusetts. Her death was announced the next morning, when a city medical examiner was called in.^[206] She was buried on December 8, 1910, at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her open-air mausoleum was designed by New York architect Egerton Swartwout (1870–1943).^[207]

Legacy

A bronze memorial relief of Eddy by Lynn sculptor Reno Pisano was unveiled in December 2000, at the corner of Market Street and Oxford Street in Lynn, Massachusetts, near the site of her fall in 1866.^[208][209]

In 1995, Eddy was elected to the National Women's Hall of Fame as the first American woman to have founded a worldwide religion.^[210]

Eddy was named one of the "100 Most Significant Americans of All Time" in 2014 by Smithsonian Magazine,^[211] and her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures was ranked as one of the "75 Books by Women Whose Words Have Changed the World" by the Women's National Book Association in 1992.^[212]