Mary Baker Eddy

Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures first appeared in 1875, and Eddy revised it for the rest of her life, through hundreds of printings, tightening the argument and reordering the chapters. Its claim is total: God is Mind and is the only reality, matter has no existence of its own, and sickness, sin and death are therefore errors of mortal belief rather than facts to be treated. Healing is accomplished by seeing through the error, and the practice of doing so, she held, was a demonstrable science that anyone could learn.

The institutional design is as distinctive as the doctrine and rather more original. In a Church of Christ, Scientist there is no sermon and no minister. Two lay readers, elected for a term, read a lesson made up of passages from the Bible and from Science and Health, in a sequence set centrally, and that is the whole service. Eddy abolished preaching deliberately, on the ground that a personality in a pulpit would come between the congregation and the two books.

She fixed the arrangement in a Manual of The Mother Church, a short book of by-laws that governs the denomination still, and which contains provisions that can be enacted only with her consent, so that the structure she left cannot readily be altered. The result is one of the most tightly specified religious institutions ever created by a single person.

Mary Baker Glover, as she then was, went to Portland in 1862 in poor health and was treated by Phineas Quimby, improved markedly, wrote to a newspaper praising him, and remained in contact until his death in 1866. Everything after that is contested.

Her own account places the discovery of Christian Science in 1866, when she recovered unexpectedly from injuries after a fall on ice while reading an account of a healing in Matthew, and holds that what she found was a revelation of divine Science that owed nothing to Quimby, whose method she came to regard as mesmerism and therefore as the opposite of her own. The Dresser family, and Quimby's son George, argued from the 1880s onward that she had taken his manuscripts and his ideas and renamed them, and the dispute ran through the courts and the press for decades.

The scholarly position today is neither of those. Historians generally accept a real debt in the early period, in vocabulary and in the basic conviction that illness is mental in origin, and also accept that what Eddy built diverges from Quimby in ways that matter: an explicitly theological metaphysics, an absolute idealism he did not hold, a scripture, and an institution he had no interest in. The atlas records the relation as debated, which is what it is, rather than adopting either camp's version.