Malinda Cramer had been ill for most of her adult life. The accounts describe more than twenty years of invalidism, physicians who could do nothing, and a move to California in the hope that the climate would help, which it did not. In 1885, sitting alone, she put a question to herself in the plainest possible terms: is it possible for me to be well, and if it is, what is it that makes it so.
What she reported was an answer, immediate and not argued for, that God is all there is, that this presence is everywhere and is her own being, and that there is therefore nothing else for sickness to be made of. Her health improved from that point and she treated the experience as the whole of her doctrine.
The name she gave it was Divine Science, and the word science is doing the work it does throughout the movement: not laboratory method, but the claim that the principle is orderly, statable and repeatable by anybody who understands it. She opened the Home College of Divine Science in San Francisco in 1888, began the magazine Harmony, and travelled to teach.
Her most consequential organisational act was outward-facing. In 1892 she was among the founders of the International Divine Science Association, the first body to gather the separate mental healing teachers into one meeting, and it is the ancestor of the umbrella organisations that gave New Thought a collective identity rather than a scatter of independent classrooms.