Marketplace of the Marvelous by Erika Janik

Author:Erika Janik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press

Mary Baker Eddy introduced her own new medical system, “Christian Science.” (Library of Congress)

Two weeks after Quimby’s death, though, Eddy discovered the path to her future. After a fall on an icy street left her largely confined to bed, Eddy found sudden relief from her painful injuries while reading passages from the Bible on Christ’s healing ministry. The “presence and power of God seemed to flood her whole being” and she stood up “healed.”91 She could not explain what happened, but she knew beyond a doubt that her recovery resulted from her reading of the Gospel. From this experience, she developed a theory based on the premise that disease resulted from one’s alienation from God. Like Quimby, she believed that illness existed in the mind; her reading of the Bible told her that it was not inherent in God’s creation. Since “God is good” and “God is all,” Eddy reasoned that evil, a category under which disease naturally fell, therefore could not possibly exist. “Evil is but an illusion,” Eddy counseled, a misbelief that needed to be changed. It was an idea that largely conformed to Quimby’s practice. She then took the extreme step of negating the existence of the physical body itself. Eddy argued that God lived in the spirit that existed in the mind, and since God was everything, what people thought of as their physical body was in reality only another misguided belief. In theory, she wrote, “a man could live just as well after his lungs had been removed as before, if he but thought he could.” She named her new approach to healing “Christian Science,” ignoring or perhaps not caring that Quimby had sometimes used that name for his system. She also disavowed any debt to her mentor and claimed only divine revelation, even though her theory appeared to be little more than Quimbyism embellished with biblical references.92

Eddy published her findings in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures in 1875 and four years later, in 1879, founded the Church of Christ (Scientist). The church soon became one of the fastest-growing denominations in the country, counting more than 200,000 members by 1925. Local churches and instructional institutes opened around the country, and several thousand Christian Science healers, more than 80 percent of them women, began practicing.93 Eddy also opened a school, a first for any of the mesmerist and magnetist mind cures in the United States, in 1881. The Massachusetts Metaphysical College graduated hundreds of doctors of Christian Science, who helped spread her message and technique from coast to coast. She’d begun teaching students more than a decade before, in 1868, promising lessons in a method “with a success far beyond any of the present modes.”94

Christian Science boasted an impressive record of cures. Healing “testimonies” appeared as a monthly feature in the Christian Science Journal, which launched in 1883. In its pages, people claimed to have been cured of cancer, blindness, and gunshot wounds to the chest. When a stage curtain descended on the

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