Author of the movement's text book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (first copyrighted 1875)
Founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts in the United States (1879)
Spiritual teacher and lecturer
Established the Christian Science Publishing Society (1898) that continues to publish periodicals she started including:

The Christian Science Journal (1883)
The Christian Science Sentinel (1898)
The Herald of Christian Science (1903)
The Christian Science Monitor (1908)

She and others credit her with the ability to heal instantaneously.

Married three times, she took the name Mary Baker Glover from her first marriage. She was also known from her third marriage as Mary Baker Glover Eddy or Mary Baker G. Eddy.

Quotes more less

Life more less

Childhood

Mary Baker Eddy was born in Bow, New Hampshire, the youngest of six children of Abigail and Mark Baker. Although raised a Congregationalist, she came to reject teachings such as predestination and original sin. She suffered chronic illness and developed a strong interest in biblical accounts of early Christian healing.

From the age of eight, Eddy began to hear voices calling her name; she would go to her mother only to learn that her mother had not called her. In her autobiography, Eddy relates one of these later experiences:

"One day, when my cousin, Mehitable Huntoon, was visiting us, and I sat in a little chair by her side, in the same room with grandmother, ... the call again came, so loud that Mehitable heard it, though I had ceased to notice it. Greatly surprised, my cousin turned to me and said, 'Your mother is calling you!' Finally, after speaking with her mother, the child Mary responded to the voice with the phrase from Samuel 'Speak, Lord; for Thy servant heareth.' When the call came again I did answer, in the words of Samuel, but never again to the material senses was that mysterious call repeated."

According to Yvonne Cache von Fettweis, in her book Christian Healer, "Mary's religious upbringing had taught her that all men are God's servants." In her discovery of Christian Science, Eddy found that healing the sick was an integral part of Christian service.From early childhood, Eddy’s life included incidents of healing others. Her family would bring sick farm animals to her to heal, for example. Some biographers have suggested Mary was high-strung or emotional; irrespective of such claims, reports from friends in the community where Eddy grew up corroborate reports of her ability to heal at a young age.Eddy frequently expressed confidence in God's love, which placed her at odds with her father's theological outlook, leading to a religious crisis when she was twelve and first eligible to join the Congregational church. Mark Baker held to a hard and bitter doctrine of predestination, believing that a horrible decree of endless punishment awaited sinners on a final judgment day. Amid their clash of views Mary developed a life-threatening fever, which at last prompted her father, in his love for her, to set aside his stern beliefs. She was healed of the fever after prayer, as she wrote:

"My mother, as she bathed my burning temples, bade me lean on God's love, which would give me rest if I went to Him in prayer, as I was wont to do, seeking His guidance. I prayed; and a soft glow of ineffable joy came over me. The fever was gone and I rose and dressed myself in a normal condition of health. Mother saw this and was glad. The physician marveled; and the "horrible decree" of Predestination ... as John Calvin rightly called his own tenet ... forever lost its power over me."

Mary did not join the Congregational church until she was seventeen at Sanbornton Bridge, New Hampshire (present-day Tilton).While Eddy attended the Pembroke Academy, an event occurred, later related by long time Tilton residents. A mentally disturbed man had escaped from the local Concord asylum and, brandishing a club, entered the Pembroke schoolyard terrifying pupils who ran shrieking into the schoolhouse. Peering through the windows, the children watched in horror as Eddy approach him as he wielded his club above her head, expecting her to be struck down before their eyes. Instead, she simply took his free hand and walked him, as he lowered his club to his side, to the schoolyard gate, from which he departed. The following Sunday he reappeared. Quietly entering the church, he walked to the Baker pew and stood beside Eddy during the hymn singing, after which he yielded without resistance into legal custody.

Early Marriages more less

On December 10, 1843, she married George Washington Glover, a Royal Arch Mason. He died of yellow fever on June 27, 1844, a little over two months before the birth of their only child, George Washington Glover. After her husband's death, Eddy freed her husband's slaves, unwilling to accept for herself the price of a human life. As a single mother of poor health, Mrs. Glover wrote some political pieces for the New Hampshire Patriot. She also worked as a substitute teacher in the New Hampshire Conference Seminary. Her success there led to her briefly opening an experimental school which was an early attempt to introduce kindergarten methods (love instead of harshness for discipline; interest instead of compulsion to impart knowledge), but this, like other similar attempts at this time was not accepted and soon closed. The social climate of the times made it very difficult for a widowed woman to earn money.

Her mother died in November 1849 and about a year later, her father remarried Elizabeth Patterson Duncan. Eddy continued to have poor health and her son was put into the care of neighbors by her father and stepmother. Eddy married Dr. Daniel Patterson, a dentist, in 1853 hoping he would adopt the young boy, and Daniel Patterson signed papers to that effect on their wedding day. However, he never followed through on his promise. Eddy was often bed-ridden during this period. Of her sisters who were able to help her in the care of her rambunctious child, sadly, none really did, beyond short periods. Her mother had passed on and her father had remarried a woman who did not welcome either Eddy or her child. A neighbor couple with a small farm and no children took up the care of the boy for a fee, during times Eddy was confined to her bed. When this couple, who found the boy useful in the farm labor, intended to move out to the Prairie territories, without her knowing, some of Eddy's family arranged that the couple should take the child along with money given them by Eddy's father. Eddy's symptoms worsened and plunged her into a deep depression. The failure of Patterson to make good on his promises of reunification with her now far-distant son plunged Eddy into deep despair. Her acute desire to recover her health led her to seek healing in the various systems fashionable of the period. Eddy was ready to try anything to bring relief to her sufferings.

Patterson chased after other women while married to Eddy. He ran into financial difficulty and mortgaged Eddy's furniture, jewelry, and books, but was still unable to keep current on their property in Groton, New Hampshire, and was eventually forced to vacate. Patterson intended to leave Groton and Eddy's sister, Abigail, removed her from her Groton home to Rumney, six miles distant, in a carriage with her blind servant following on foot.

Persistent Ill Health more less

Study with Phineas Quimby and His Influence more less

In October 1862 she became a patient of Phineas Quimby, a magnetic healer from Maine. She benefited temporarily by his treatment and his beliefs influenced her later thinking and writing, although to what extent has been frequently disputed. Originally, Eddy gave Quimby much credit for his hypnotic treatments of her nervous and physical conditions and initially thought his brand of mesmerism entirely benign. From Quimby, Eddy was first exposed to the effects of unseen mental influences and beliefs on sick patients.While Quimby had his own notions on the nature of these unseen forces, which Eddy accepted early on, she would later draw decidedly different opinions on the nature of thought on the body and reject any form of hypnotism.

After being helped by Quimby, Eddy wrote the following defense of him in the Portland (Maine) Evening Courier in the fall of 1862: "...now I can see dimly at first, and only as trees walking, the great principle which underlies Dr. Quimby's faith and works; and just in proportion to my light perception of truth is my recovery. This truth which he opposes to the error of giving intelligence to matter and placing pain where it never placed itself, if received understandingly, changes the currents of the system to their normal action; and the mechanism of the body goes on undisturbed. That this is a science capable of demonstration becomes clear to the minds of those patients who reason upon the process of their cure."

On the day following the publication of the above article her views were criticized by a rival newspaper, the Portland Advertiser. Eddy wrote a second article, replying to the criticism. In it appeared the following paragraph, referring to Quimby and his doctrine: "P. P. Quimby stands upon the plane of wisdom with his truth. Christ healed the sick, but not by jugglery or with drugs. P. P. Quimby rolls away the stone from the sepulchre of error, and health is the resurrection."

This quote stands in contrast to what she would later write in Science and Health, "Glory be to God, and peace to the struggling hearts! Christ hath rolled away the stone from the door of human hope and faith, and through the revelation and demonstration of life in God, hath elevated them to possible at-one-ment with the spiritual idea of man and his divine Principle, Love." She claimed her understanding of the spiritual message of the Bible deepened and her understanding of what she called "the Christ" replaced references to personal saviors.

1866 Injury, Healing and Study Leads to Christian Science more less

After a severe fall in Lynn, Massachusetts caused a major spinal injury in February 1866, Eddy turned to Matthew 9:2 in the Bible and allegedly recovered unexpectedly. Although she filed a claim for money from the city of Lynn for her injury on the grounds that she was "still suffering from the effects of that fall," she later withdrew the lawsuit.

She devoted the next three years of her life to Biblical study and what she considered the discovery of Christian Science. In her autobiography, Retrospection and Introspection, Eddy writes "I then withdrew from society about three years,--to ponder my mission, to search the Scriptures, to find the Science of Mind that should take the things of God and show them to the creature, and reveal the great curative Principle, --Deity."

Convinced by her own study of the Bible, especially Genesis 1, and through experimentation, Eddy claimed to have found healing power through a higher sense of God as Spirit and man as God's spiritual "image and likeness." She became convinced that illness could be healed through an awakened thought brought about by a clearer perception of God and the explicit rejection of drugs, hygiene and medicine based upon the observation that Jesus did not use these methods for healing:

It is plain that God does not employ drugs or hygiene, nor provide them for human use; else Jesus would have recommended and employed them in his healing. The tender word and Christian encouragement of an invalid, pitiful patience with his fears and the removal of them, are better than hecatombs of gushing theories, stereotyped borrowed speeches, and the doling of arguments, which are but so many parodies on legitimate Christian Science, aflame with divine Love. (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, 143:5, 155:15)

She eventually called this spiritual perception the operation of the Christ Truth on human consciousness.

Claiming to have first healed herself and then others, and having learned from these experiences, Eddy felt anyone could perceive what she called "the Kingdom of Heaven" or spiritual reality on earth. For her, this healing method was based on scientific principles and could be taught to others. This positive rule of healing, she taught, resulted from a new understanding of God as infinite Spirit beyond the limitations of the material senses.

At this time no one knows how much, or even if, Eddy influenced the great social and political movements of her day including abolition, the Wellness health movement and the women's suffrage movement.

Publishing Her Discovery more less

Distinguishing Between Eddy and Quimby and Other Criticisms more less

Gillian Gill, writes

I am now firmly convinced, having weighed all the evidence I could find in published and archival sources, that Mrs. Eddy's most famous biographer-critics -- Peabody, Milmine, Dakin, Bates and Dittemore and Gardner -- 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.

Although Eddy used terms such as "Science", "Health", "error", "shadow", "belief", "Christ" and others used by Quimby, these terms are also to be found in the Bible. In the end, her conclusions from scriptural study and continued healing practice were diametrically opposed to the Quimby's teachings. Eddy also eventually rejected many of Quimby's conclusions on the dynamics of human disease, suffering, healing, redemption, God and Christ.

Through her study of the Bible, Eddy rejected Quimby's notion of a dualism between matter and spirit. She wrote in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, "All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all. Spirit is immortal Truth; matter is mortal error." (S&H 468: 10-12)

Eddy found that while at first hypnotism seemed to benefit the patient, it later created more problems than the original sickness. Ultimately she rejected any form of hypnotism or mesmerism, stating

The hypnotizer employs one error to destroy another. If he heals sickness through a belief, and a belief originally caused the sickness, it is a case of the greater error overcoming the lesser. This greater error thereafter occupies the ground, leaving the case worse than before it was grasped by the stronger error. (S&H 104:22-28)

Eddy's use of these terms and her teaching are considered by both her defenders and Quimby's family to be distinct from Quimbyism. Quimby's son, George, wrote, "Don’t confuse his method of healing with Mrs. Eddy’s Christian Science, so far as her religious teachings go.... The religion which she teaches certainly is hers, for which I cannot be too thankful." (Gottschalk, Rolling Away the Stone, p. 72).

Phineas Quimby died in January 1866. In 1873, Eddy divorced Patterson for adultery to which he readily admitted. In 1877 she married Asa Gilbert Eddy, who died in 1882.

In 1903 Mark Twain published a satirical diatribe attacking Eddy and her church entitled Christian Science. Twain wrote

We cannot peacefully agree as to her motives, therefore her character must remain crooked to some of us and straight to the others. No matter, she is interesting enough without an amicable agreement. In several ways she is the most interesting woman that ever lived and the most extraordinary. The same may be said of her career, and the same may be said of its chief result...Whether she took it or invented it, it was...materially...a sawdust mine when she got it, and she has turned it into a Klondike; its spiritual dock had next to no custom, if any at all: from it she has launched a world-religion which has now six hundred and sixty-three churches, and she charters a new one every four days. When we do not know a person...and also when we do...we have to judge the size and nature of his achievements as compared with the achievements of others in his special line of business...there is no other way. Measured by this standard, it is thirteen hundred years since the world has produced anyone who could reach up to Mrs. Eddy's waistbelt.

However, later he seemed to reverse his stance as Paine wrote:

I was at this period interested a good deal in mental healing, and had been treated for neurasthenia with gratifying results. Like most of the world, I had assumed, from his published articles, that he condemned Christian Science and its related practices out of hand. When I confessed, rather reluctantly, one day, the benefit I had received, he surprised me by answering:"Of course you have been benefited. Christian Science is humanity's boon. Mother Eddy deserves a place in the Trinity as much as any member of it. She has organized and made available a healing principle that for two thousand years has never been employed, except as the merest kind of guesswork. She is the benefactor of the age."

It seemed strange, at the time, to hear him speak in this way concerning a practice of which he was generally regarded as the chief public antagonist. It was another angle of his many-sided character.

In view of Mark Twain's extended and caustic attack in his book "Christian Science" on both Christian Science and its founder, Mary Baker Eddy (whom he once described as the "queen of frauds and hypocrites"), it is widely assumed that his reference to "Mother Eddy" as "the benefactor of the age" was purely sarcastic. When Harper's refused to publish "Christian Science" in 1903, Twain interpreted the rejection as suppression caused by pressure from Christian Science and wrote, "The situation is not barren of humour. I had been doing my best to show in print that the Xn Scientist cult has become a power in the land - well, here is the proof: it has scared the biggest publisher in the Union."

Building a Church more less

Death more less

Legacy more less

Residences more less

Eddy Biographies, Pro and Con and in Between more less

A well footnoted (scholarly) biography which eventually became the church-authorized biography of Eddy is Robert Peel's trilogy Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery (ISBN 0030575559), Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial (ISBN 0875101186), and Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority (ISBN 003021081X). (1966—1971)
A more recent single volume is another originally independent, but now church-authorized and still controversial, 1999 work by a non-Christian Scientist, Gillian Gill (ISBN 0-7382-0227-4). Gill's work included a review of numerous other Eddy biographies over the years. She also uncovered evidence that Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, from whom critics have long-claimed Eddy stole all her ideas, could not possibly have been the "author" of the so-called "Quimby Manuscripts" as Horatio Dressor, the son of two of Quimby's students, claimed. Gill wrote that Quimby's actual manuscripts, in his own almost illegible handwriting, indicated that for all intents and purposes Quimby was functionally illiterate and could not write a single cogent English paragraph let alone the manuscripts. She also uncovered materials that demonstrated that Dresser intentionally left out all manuscripts that would have demonstrated the independence of Eddy's ideas from Quimby's.
See also Stephen Gottschalk, Rolling Away the Stone, Mary Baker Eddy's Challenge to Materialism, (ISBN 0-253-34673-8) for a new account of her founding the church and relations to critics such as Mark Twain. (Indiana University Press: 2006)
Mary Baker Eddy, Speaking for Herself (ISBN 0-87952-275-5)
Willa Cather and Georgine Milmine The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science (1993) began as a famous magazine series 1907—08 and critical book in 1909.
Doris and Moris Grekel also wrote three-part non church-authorized biography on Eddy, The Discovery of the Science of Man: (1821—1888), (ISBN 1-893107-23-X), The Founding of Christian Science: The Life of Mary Baker Eddy 1888—1900, (ISBN 1-893107-24-8), and The Forever Leader: (1901—1910) (ISBN 0-9645803-8-1). This biography was aimed at serious students of Christian Science as opposed to the general public.
Former Church treasurer and clerk, John V. Dittemore teamed up with Ernest Sutherland Bates, in 1932, to write a biography, Mary Baker Eddy - The Truth and the Tradition. Most of the prose was written by Bates and Dittemore would later distance himself from the book. It has some genuinely distinct information including a list of Eddy's students taught at the Massachusetts Metaphysical College.
The famous Viennese novelist Stefan Zweig wrote a biography "The Mental Healers: Mesmer, Freud, Mary Baker Eddy." Original in German: "Die Heilung durch den Geist: Mesmer, Freud, Mary Baker Eddy." Zweig based his book solely on the Milmine biography (above) and after consultation with Sigmund Freud, concluded that Eddy was a madwoman. He never read her seminal work "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" although it was available in German. Zweig's widow in a biography stated that Zweig had regretted his version of Eddy. A 1998 German reprinting of the book contains an afterword with corrections to Zweig's presentation.
Martin Gardner, The Healing Revelations of Mary Baker Eddy, Prometheus Books, 1993.