Christian Science

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Origins-Mary Baker Eddy

Socially, politically and economically, early 19th-century America was experiencing a great deal of changes. This was soon to be intensified by the Civil War (1861-65). The mood of stem Calvinism was gradually changing, and new quasi-scientific movements began to appear.

New England and New York had become hotbeds of interest in all things connected with unconventional medicine. The 19th century can fairly be described as the golden age of the quack doctor. Mass education had brought with it the popular press with a large uncritical readership ready to swallow any miracle as long as it was framed in pseudo-scientific language.

Doctors were thin on the ground and science had caught the popular imagination and added a new irresistible frisson to the ancient practice of quackery, which had previously had to rely on folklore and superstition for its credibility.

The 1890s saw the rise to prominence of Mary Morse Baker, better known as Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910). Mark Twain called her 'the most daring and masculine woman that has appeared on the earth in centuries'. It was this New Hampshire mystagogue who founded the Christian Science movement.

Formative years

Her upbringing was pervaded by a claustrophobic Calvinism provided by her father, Mark Baker. Her mother's death in childbirth in 1849, when Mary was a teenager, profoundly affected her. It would be the first of many deaths of people that were close to her in her life.

Throughout her childhood she was given to temper tantrums, usually brought about by arguments with her father. These tantrums graduated to hysteria and even visions in her adolescent years. Once she claimed to hear voices calling her 'three times in ascending scale', a story that echoes the Biblical story of Samuel.

She was also given to extended bouts of dieting, which would bring her to an almost emaciated state. When the traumas of adolescence became too much she could be restored to equanimity only by being rocked like a child in the arms of her father, a fact that more than one psychologist has seized on in search of the illuminating principle of her life.

At twenty-two she married George Washington Glover, a building contractor eleven years her senior. His death from yellow fever the following year, 1844, left Baker with a son, her only child, and financially virtually penniless. Her child was eventually fostered, and they would enjoy an ambivalent relationship for the rest of their lives.