Publication of Science and Health

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Her ideas (Quimby had already used the term 'Christian Science' in describing his philosophy) were formally enunciated in her magnum opus, Science and Health. Her hypothesis was that 'the only realities are the divine mind and its ideas .... Rightly understood, instead of possessing sentient matter, we have sensationless bodies .... Whence came to me this conviction in antagonism to the testimony of the human senses'? From the self-evident fact that matter has no sensation; from the common human experience of the falsity of all material things; from the obvious fact that mortal mind is what suffers, feels, sees: since matter cannot suffer.'

Baker also wrote: T cannot be supermodest in my estimation of the Christian Science textbook'. This perhaps unconsciously ironic appraisal of the bible of the Christian Science movement comes from the Christian Science Journal of 1901.

In writing the book she had 'borrowed' verbatim thirty-three pages of a work by the scholar Francis Lieber, which dealt with the work of the German philosopher Hegel. Another hundred pages of Lieber's work she simply reworded. This reworking of ideas already extant was, in truth, completely appropriate to the spirit of all the other competing forms of Christian healing at the time, which were all variations on a theme compounded of contemporary religious ideas, occult practices and metaphysics, with the leaders of these various sects all drawing from the same well.

Other aspects of the movement were probably appropriated from other sects; for example, her advocacy of silent prayer was taken from Quakerism. It is ironic that one of her former students, called Arens, was sued by her for infringing her copyright on Christian Science ideas in his book Old Theology in its Application to the Healing of the Sick. She was renowned for the swift repression of any potential rivalry for the leadership of the movement.

In 1877 she married for a third time, aged fifty-six, to a forty-five-year-old agent for a sewing machine manufacturer, called Asa Gilbert Eddy. Like her, he also suffered from poor health. A passive recipient of his wife's doctrines, he was the first acolyte to become a public convert to the Church of Christ, Scientist, which she founded in Boston in 1879.

Although supposedly cured of assorted abdominal and chest pains by his wife, Asa's pains returned after a short interval. Like Quimby before him, he insisted that he could control the pains himself. Eddy claimed that her husband was being 'mentally murdered' by means of animal magnetism employed by her enemies.

This streak of paranoia became marked in her later years. For instance, she ascribed her public maligning and ridicule, as well as her personal misfortune, to the result of an unseen baleful influence, what she called 'animal magnetism'.

Eventually they resorted to orthodox medicine for treatment. Organic heart disease was diagnosed and later confirmed at Asa's autopsy. Eddy refused to accept this diagnosis and insisted that an unseen psychic Mafia had murdered her husband.