In 1866, she fell on ice and became paralyzed. After reading the Bible for three days without a break, she suddenly began to feel better. She thought this was evidence of God's healing power. The central teaching of her church was that the Bible was more effective than medicine in healing disease.
Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) was born on a farm in New Hampshire. As a child, she was plagued with chronic conditions. She had health problems most of her life. This situation shaped many of her religious thoughts.
Baker Eddy married for the first time at the age of twenty-two and became pregnant soon after. However, her wife died shortly before her son George was born in 1844. Eddy married a doctor because the money she earned as a teacher was not enough to support her son. They divorced soon after and she lost custody of her son.
Financial and emotional distress caused health problems to reoccur. Baker was suffering from severe depression. Although she was a very religious person, her religious beliefs did not provide her with solace. In the 1850s and 1860s, she resorted to various methods to get rid of her problems. She experimented with homeopathy, hot and cold baths (hydropathy), and Quimbyism, named after Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866), a Maine clockmaker who claimed she could cure her patients by hypnotizing them. But her problems continued. In 1866, she fell on ice and became paralyzed. After reading the Bible for three days without a break, she suddenly began to feel better. She thought this was evidence of God's healing power.
Mary Baker Eddy (July 16, 1821 – December 3, 1910) was an American religious leader and author who founded The Church of Christ, Scientist, in New England in 1879. She also founded The Christian Science Monitor in 1908, and three religious magazines: the Christian Science Sentinel, The Christian Science Journal, and The Herald of Christian Science. She wrote numerous books and articles, the most notable of which were Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures and Manual of The Mother Church. Other works were edited posthumously into the Prose Works Other than Science and Health.
In 1872, she began writing her work titled Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Her book was published in 1875 and soon became a bestseller. She married a reader named Asa Gilbert Eddy in 1877. She founded The Church of Christ, Scientist in Boston in 1879. The central teaching of her church was that the Bible was more effective than medicine in healing disease.
He established reading rooms to disseminate her teachings. Her followers had the opportunity to read the Bible and church publications here. Reading rooms and the Christian Science Monitor newspaper remain influential today.
She stopped leading the church in 1889. She moved to New Hampshire. Following her death at the age of eighty-nine, she was buried in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Additional Information
Baker Eddy's brother, Albert (1810–1841), was a lawyer in New Hampshire with Franklin Pierce (1804–1869). Pierce would later become the 14th president of the United States.
Following the death of her first husband, Baker Eddy started a home for kids. However, it went bankrupt within a few months.
Since its founding, many people have criticized Christian Science for being anti-drug. Irish writer George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) says that this movement rejects both modern medicine and the concept of sin in Christianity. He jokes that the church is neither Christian nor scientific.