EDDY, MARY BAKER

born July 16, 1821, Bow, near Concord, N.H., U.S. died Dec. 3, 1910, Chestnut Hill, Mass. founder of the religious faith known as Christian Science. A daughter of Mark and Abigail Baker, Congregationalist descendants of old New England families, Mary had limited formal education because of illness, but she read and studied at home and began to write both prose and poetry at an early age. In 1843 she married George W. Glover, who died before the birth of their son, George. Because of her ill health, the boy was reared primarily by others and had little contact with his mother. Suffering almost constantly from a spinal malady, she was preoccupied with questions of health. She experimented with homeopathy and in 1853 married Daniel Patterson, a dentist who shared this interest. Before their marriage ended in divorce in 1873, Mrs. Patterson sought out and was healed by Phineas P. Quimby of Portland, Maine, who performed remarkable cures without medication. She thought he had rediscovered the healing method of Jesus, and she lectured and wrote of it in regional periodicals. Despite subsequent official statements of her church denying any influence of Quimby, some scholars have considered him an important source of her views. Soon after Quimby died her illness recurred, and in 1866 she suffered a severe fall and called her own case hopeless. She was healed that year, however, after reading in the New Testament, which she marked as the point of her discovery of Christian Science. Separated from her husband, she spent several lonely years in writing and evolving her system, discussing it with some and teaching it to Hiram S. Crafts, Richard Kennedy, and others who subsequently became successful healers. In 1875 she published Science and Health, revised before her death as Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Regarded by her followers as divinely inspired, this work and the Bible formed the Scripture of the new faith. She soon held public meetings in Lynn, Roxbury, and Boston, Mass., and in 1877 married one of her followers, Asa G. Eddy (d. 1882). Steps were taken to organize the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston in 1879, and two years later Mrs. Eddy founded the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, where she taught until it closed in 1889. Meetings in Boston moved in 1895 from rented halls to the newly dedicated Mother Church and then to its larger extension, still a Boston landmark, in 1906. Branch churches, following organizational directives issued by Mrs. Eddy and collected in the Church Manual, were started in other cities; their members often belonged also to the Mother Church in Boston. A self-perpetuating board of directors, set up by Mrs. Eddy, operated as the ruling authority according to the Manual, which is considered inspired and may not be amended. In 1883 she founded the monthly Christian Science Journal, in 1898 the weekly Christian Science Sentinel, and in 1908 The Christian Science Monitor, which has achieved a reputation as one of the leading daily newspapers in the United States. Other machinery created by Mrs. Eddy, such as the boards of education and of lectureship and the committee on publication, continue to promote Christian Science. Among her major works are Miscellaneous Writings (1896); Retrospection and Introspection (1892); Unity of Good (1887); and Rudimental Divine Science (1908). Additional reading Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy, 3 vol. (196677); Julius Silberger, Mary Baker Eddy: An Interpretive Biography of the Founder of Christian Science (1980).