Mary Morse Baker Glover Patterson Eddy

• Mary Baker Eddy
• Born: July 16, 1821
• Died: December 3, 1910

Founder of Christian Science, was born in Bow, New Hampshire, five miles south of Concord. Her parents, Abigail (Ambrose) Baker and Mark Baker, who owned a 200-acre farm, were both descendants of Scottish and English immigrants, all of whom had settled in the New World by the mid-seventeenth century. They were both devout members of the Congregational church, first in Bow and then in Sanborton Bridge, New Hampshire (later named Tilton), where the family settled in 1836. Abigail Baker remained “sweet-tempered, kindly and efficient” throughout her life; whereas Mark Baker, an austere New Englander, “possessed a strong intellect and an iron will.”

Mary Baker’s childhood was dominated by constant ill health, a combination of the nervous fits, seizures, and hallucinations that plagued her throughout life. Always considered special by her family—she was the youngest of three sons and three daughters—because of her frequent illnesses, Baker came to have a control over family members that she would learn to use most effectively in dominating religious disciples later in life.

Baker’s general education suffered because of her health. She acquired a taste for literature, a lifelong interest, from her college-bound brothers but was educated in little else except during a few brief periods at local schools and academies. Her religious education, however, was not neglected. Baker’s parents made their orthodox religion part of daily life, and she also studied her catechism in a formal manner at church. She became a member of the Tilton Congregational Church either at age twelve or seventeen. (Though church records list her as seventeen, she later claimed to have been only twelve.)

On December 10, 1843, twenty-two-year-old Mary Baker married George Washington Glover, a family friend who was eleven years her senior. Despite her poor health, she accompanied her husband first to Charleston, South Carolina, and then to Wilmington, North Carolina, where he had a lumber business. Life in the South passed pleasantly, with the only major disruption being the stir provoked by her letters, published in a Wilmington newspaper, denouncing the Whigs and their presidential candidate, Henry Clay. This relatively peaceful time in her life ended abruptly with Glover’s death on June 27, 1844, from an attack of bilious (or yellow) fever. The young widow, seven-months pregnant, had no choice but to return home, less than nine months after her wedding day.

Once home, Mary Glover immediately resumed her role as the chronically ill youngest child. Her hysterical symptoms returned and were aggravated by the birth of her son (and only child), George Washington Glover, on September 11, 1844. Despite some respites in her condition, she was never able to care for her son. He was eventually placed with a neighbor, Mahala Sanborn, who took the boy to Minnesota after her marriage. Though Glover maintained some contact with her son over the years, she never experienced a traditional mother-son relationship typical of nineteenth-century families.

In 1849 Abigail Baker died, and a year later Mark Baker married Elizbeth Patterson Duncan. On June 21, 1853, Mary Glover married Daniel Patterson, an itinerant dentist from New Hampshire, who was her stepmother’s nephew The newlyweds moved first to Franklin, New Hampshire, and then in 1855 to North Groton, New Hampshire, where her sister Martha lent them a home. The years that followed were among the worst in Mary Patterson’s life. Separated from most of her family and frequently abandoned by her traveling husband, she remained a bedridden victim of her physical and mental maladies.

Finally, in 1860, realizing the desperate plight of her sister, Abigail Baker Tilton moved the Pattersons to a boardinghouse near her home in Rumney, New Hampshire. Shortly thereafter, when Daniel Patterson joined the Union Army and subsequently became a Confederate prisoner, Mary Patterson moved in with her sister.

Several years later, still a helpless invalid, she became a patient at Dr. William Vail’s water-cure sanatorium in Hill, New Hampshire, hoping that this then popular cure would alleviate her symptoms. Though the water cure failed, while in Hill she heard of the successful healing procedures of Phineas P. Quimby, a mental healer from Portland, Maine. Intrigued by the possibility of being cured, she went to Portland in October 1862, for one of the most important meetings of her life.

Quimby believed that with the help of positive mental processes and with the laying on of hands —a process of scalp manipulation—a practitioner of mental healing could relieve the symptoms of another person’s suffering. The effect of his techniques on Mary Patterson were startling She immediately felt well enough to climb the steps of a nearby tower and for the first time in her life continued to make rapid progress toward good health.

Remaining with Quimby for several weeks in order to study his techniques and his writings, she became one of Quimby’s disciples. She found two of his beliefs to be the most convincing. The first was that diseases were both caused and cured by mental processes; illness was therefore a false belief—a finding that linked health to religion. Second, she believed Quimby’s hypothesis that one person could transmit either helpful or harmful telepathic messages to another person (telepathic magnetism), even if physically separated from the recipient. Together these beliefs were to form the core of her future philosophy.

With her health restored, Mary Patterson rejoined her husband in November and once again endured a number of moves until they finally settled in Saco, Maine. By 1864 she was chronically ill once again and returned to Quimby for further treatment. After her cure she began to accept her own calls for healing and to give public lectures with increasing ardor. Later that year she returned to her husband in Lynn, Massachusetts, and began to conduct a relatively normal life, but one that now included lectures as well as writings on topics such as temperance and mental healing.

This tranquil life came to an abrupt end, however, with the deaths of her beloved father, in 1865, and of Quimby, on January 16, 1866. The following month she injured her spine from a fall on ice in Lynn, an accident that led her to discover “how to be well myself, and how to make others so.” (The episode also led to H. L. Mencken’s famous jibe, “Mary Baker Eddy fell on the ice and discovered Christian Science.”) Despite the reputed warnings of a doctor that Mary Patterson would never walk again, she rose only a few days later after reading Matt. 9:2.

And, behold, they brought to him a man sick of the palsy, lying on a bed: and Jesus, seeing their faith, said unto the sick of the palsy; Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee.

When a fellow Quimby disciple refused to aid Patterson in her recovery, she began to feel that it had become her personal responsibility not only to cure herself but also to practice and teach Quimby’s method of mental healing. By the time she had fully recovered, she was committed to this cause.

After Daniel Patterson’s final desertion in 1866 (they were divorced in 1873 and Mary Glover resumed her previous name), she commenced what was to be a decade-long journey from the home of one disciple to another, exchanging teaching and healing practice for room and board while developing more fully her theory of mental healing. Her need for constant care eventually antagonized each of her hosts, and she was frequently forced to move. Finally, in the spring of 1870, she instituted a partnership with a former pupil, Richard Kennedy, and settled down under an agreement by which he would heal patients and she would teach the process of healing. The partnership lasted only two years however; it was broken apart by a series of irreconcilable personality differences and disputes over theory.

Though Mary Glover never forgave Kennedy and later said that she felt threatened by him for the rest of her life, Glover benefited both financially and philosophically from the partnership. Kennedy gave her a settlement of $6,000, and she discovered during the two-year association that her true forte was the teaching rather than the practice of mental healing.

The years between 1866 and 1875 had provided her with a number of loyal disciples besides Kennedy, so that by 1875, when she bought her first house, in Lynn, she could rightfully name it the “Christian Scientists’ Home.” The year 1875 was a landmark in her life. During that time, besides purchasing the house, she held the first public Christian Science (the religious framework Glover created for her theories) service; she met Asa Gilbert Eddy, who would become her third and most devoted husband; and her long-awaited manuscript, Science and Health, was published.

The first edition of Science and Health was a 456-page rambling account of her science of health concept, culminating over a decade of thought and work. Like Quimby (though she publicly denied his influence), Glover attributed all “good” to God and then extended that belief to the notion that good was therefore the only reality. Since health was good, coming as it did from pious behavior, ill health was an evil, a false belief that could be purged from the system through the process of mental healing. It was through the concept of goodness as a true belief that mental healing became a religion.

Despite its importance to Christian Science, Science and Health did not sell widely; the church’s growth was actually due to the constant lecturing and support of Glover and her disciples. Principal among her followers was Daniel (Harry) Spofford, who took Glover’s course in 1875 on the advice of his already graduated wife. He soon came to be Mary Glover’s main supporter, was instrumental in the publication of her manuscript, and became an accomplished healer in his own right.

It was Spofford who introduced Glover to Asa Gilbert Eddy, one of his patients—a man ten years her junior. Though she had often been attracted to young male disciples, Glover frequently found herself threatened by their tendency to abandon her and the church once they were fully trained. But in Asa Eddy she found a subdued, gentle man, whose only desire was to be her loyal attendant. On January 1, 1877, at her request, they were married.

With the exception of the marriage, however, the late 1870s presented Mary Eddy with a great deal of unpleasantness. The filing of several lawsuits against her by discontented students and the defections of disciples—even Daniel Spofford—led her to develop the concept of Malicious Animal Magnetism (MAM) as an explanation for such misfortunes. Through the process of MAM, she reasoned, a malevolent person could send malicious telepathic messages to an unwitting recipient.

Eddy blamed all of her afflictions on the malicious intentions of Kennedy, Spofford, and the other recalcitrant disciples who had the power to afflict her mind, her body, and even her homes, from which she was often forced to move. Her obsession with MAM caused the hurried publication of Science and Health’s second edition in 1878 and found its way into the lectures on mental healing; MAM was even listed as the cause of Asa Eddy’s death in 1882. Fear of MAM terrorized Mary Eddy for the rest of her life.

Despite Eddy’s personal problems, her church continued to grow. In 1876 the Christian Science Association was formed; three years later the Church of Christ (Scientist) was chartered; and in 1881 the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, for training future Christian Science practitioners, was officially sanctioned. After her 1882 move to Boston, prompted by the desertion of eight valued disciples, Eddy devoted her entire life to the church, surrounding herself at home with her most loyal followers. After Asa Eddy died, young Calvin Frye assumed the role of most devoted disciple, remaining with her the rest of her life.

Mary Eddy traveled to the Midwest several times to lecture, appearing at the church’s Chicago national convention in 1888, a gathering that affirmed the organization’s wide appeal. She revised Science and Health more than 380 times before her death and wrote voluminously for the monthly Christian Science Journal (started in 1883), the weekly Christian Science Sentinel (begun in 1898), and the daily Christian Science Monitor (founded in 1908).

In 1892, desiring complete control over the “Mother Church”—which was to be established at Boston in 1895—Eddy disbanded the National Christian Scientist Association, which had been formed in 1886 to unify followers, and created a more centralized organization, over which she retained complete control. She remained threatened by ambitious disciples and their branch churches; Eddy went so far as to excommunicate one of her most loyal worshipers, Augusta Stetson, fearing the latter’s great success with the New York church.

The Church of Christ (Scientist) was one of the most important religious institutions in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. At a time of widespread discontent with traditional Christian doctrine, it provided one of the best organized and most powerful alternatives. Moreover, in an urbanized and industrializing society, it gave people needed hope as they strived to cope with the disruptions in traditional patterns of work, family relationships, and religious worship.

Christian Science provided its followers with a feeling that they could control their lives. It offered a doctrinal system with a choice, teaching that with true belief and pious worship the goodness that comes from God could surface, thus allowing people to improve the quality of their lives. With the growth of scientific theory and the emergence of modern medicine, together with a dawning recognition of health’s psychological determinants, Eddy’s science of health offered her adherents a clear method by which they could understand and even change their circumstances. Her church could prove its appeal by the number of followers: in 1906 there were over 85,000 members, and by 1936 there were more than three times as many (according to the federal religious census).

The final decades of Eddy’s life are shrouded in mystery, as she retired in 1889 to Concord, New Hampshire, returning to Boston only four times before her death. She continued to control her church until the end, despite questions of competency culminating in her son’s unsuccessful 1907 suit, which proved conclusively that she was completely lucid. Finally, plagued by constant fears of MAM and afflicted with a number of bodily illnesses, she died at home, aged eighty-nine, and was interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after a modest ceremony. The bulk of her estate, worth $2.5 million, was left to the church.

As her primary legacy, Mary Baker Eddy left the world a church structure and theology that have endured to the present day. Her doctrine of Christian Science was both a religion and a reform; through it she was able to give people a belief system that offered them hope for the betterment of their lives.

The best sources on Mary Baker Eddy’s beliefs and theology are her own writings. Among these the most important are the aforementioned Science and Health, whose latest revision occurred in 1910; Retrospection and Introspection (1891), the most autobiographical of her works; and Miscellaneous Writings (1896), which collects many of her published articles. She was a regular contributor to many newspapers, in particular her own Christian Science Journal and Christian Science Sentinel. Because of church censorship, her papers have been scattered and are not always available, but the greater portion of them are housed in the Bridwell Library at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, and at the Longyear Foundation in Brookline, Massachusetts. Secondary works on Eddy can be divided into two categories—those written by Christian Scientists and those written by others. Of the former the best works include S. Wilbur, The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (1907); L. P. Powell, Mary Baker Eddy (1930); and R. Peel, Christian Science: Its Encounter with American Culture (1958)— which places the movement in the perspective of its times. A great deal of other material has also been published by Christian Scientists; for a more detailed bibliography, see Notable American Women (1971). See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1931). Many biographies by non-Christian Scientists have also emerged. E. F. Dakin, Mrs. Eddy: The Biography of a Virginal Mind (1929), remains the most complete and best documented of these works. Also of great value are G. Milmine, The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science (1909); E. S. Bates and J. V. Dittemore, Mary Baker Eddy: The Truth and the Tradition (1932); R. Peel, Mary Baker Eddy, 3 vols. (1966-77); and J. Silberger, Mary Baker Eddy: An Interpretive Biography of the Founder of Christian Science (1980)—a psychohistorical study.