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Mary Baker Eddy

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Template:Short description Template:Use American English Template:Use mdy dates Template:Infobox person Mary Baker Eddy (nee Baker; July 16, 1821 – December 3, 1910) was an American religious leader and author, who in 1879 founded The Church of Christ, Scientist, the Mother Church of the Christian Science movement. She also founded The Christian Science Monitor in 1908, and three religious magazines: the Christian Science Sentinel, The Christian Science Journal, and The Herald of Christian Science.<ref name="Eddy Biography">Template:Cite news</ref>

Eddy wrote numerous books and articles, most notably the 1875 book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, selected as one of the "75 Books By Women Whose Words Have Changed The World" by the Women's National Book Association.<ref>75 Books by Women Whose Words Have Changed the World</ref> She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1995.<ref name="Christian Healer">Template:Cite news</ref> Other works Eddy authored include Manual of The Mother Church, and a collection of varied writings that were consolidated posthumously into a book called Prose Works.<ref name="Eddy Biography">Template:Cite news</ref>

Early life

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Bow, New Hampshire

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Family

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Eddy's birthplace in Bow, New Hampshire

Eddy was born Mary Morse Baker on July 16, 1821, in a farmhouse in Bow, New Hampshire to farmer Mark Baker (d. 1865) and his wife Abigail Barnard Baker, née Ambrose (d. 1849). Eddy was the youngest of six children: boys Samuel Dow (1808), Albert (1810), and George Sullivan (1812), followed by girls Abigail Barnard (1816), Martha Smith (1819), and Mary Morse (1821).Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn She was the cousin of U.S. Representative Henry M. Baker.Template:Sfn

She was the sixth generation of her family born in the United States.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn The farmhouse she was born in was built by her grandfather, Joseph Baker Jr., on a tract of land his maternal grandfather, Captain John Lovewell, had been given for service in the American Revolutionary War. Eddy's father Mark inherited, alongside his elder brother James, the farm when Joseph Jr. died in 1816.Template:Sfn

A staunch Calvinist, Mark Baker was an active member of the Tilton Congregationalist Church.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn McClure's reported he had a reputation for holding strong opinions and quarreling with those he disagreed with; one neighbor described him as "[a] tiger for a temper and always in a row."Template:Sfn They also claimed he was an ardent supporter of slavery and a Copperhead who was reportedly pleased to hear about Abraham Lincoln's death.Template:Sfn Despite trying to oust his Republican pastor during the war alongside a faction of his church, he refused to leave the church alongside other members of the faction when they failed. Instead, he continued to attend services, but would storm out at the mention of the American Civil War during a service.Template:Sfn

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Mark Baker

Eddy and her father reportedly had a volatile relationship. Ernest Sutherland Bates and John V. Dittemore wrote in 1932 that Baker sought to break Eddy's will with harsh punishment, although her mother often intervened;Template:Sfn in contrast to the strict religiosity of her father, Eddy's mother was described as devout, quiet, light-hearted and nurturing, and a benevolent spiritual influence on Eddy in her formative years.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

Health

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Eddy experienced periods of sudden illness.Template:Sfn Those who knew the family described her as suddenly falling to the floor, writhing and screaming, or silent and apparently unconscious, sometimes for hours.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Historian Robert Peel wrote that these fits would require the family to send Eddy to the village doctor.Template:Sfn

The cause for Eddy's illness was unclear, but biographer Caroline Fraser wrote she believed the cause was most likely psychogenic in nature.Template:Sfn According to psychoanalyst Julius Silberger, Eddy may have been motivated to have these fits in an effort to control her father's attitude toward her.Template:Sfn Fraser attributed the illness likely to a combination of hypochondria and histrionics as well.Template:Sfn

Tilton, New Hampshire

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File:EddyChildhoodChurch.jpg
The Congregational Church in Tilton, New Hampshire, which Eddy attended

In 1836, when Eddy was about 14 to 15 years old, she moved with her family to the town of Sanbornton Bridge, New Hampshire, approximately Template:Convert north of Bow. Sanbornton Bridge was renamed in 1869 as Tilton, New Hampshire.Template:Sfn

Ernest Bates and John Dittemore write that Eddy was not able to attend Sanbornton Academy when the family first moved there but was required instead to start at the district school (in the same building) with the youngest girls. She withdrew after a month because of poor health, then received private tuition from the Reverend Enoch Corser. She entered Sanbornton Academy in 1842.Template:Sfn

She was received into the Congregational church in Tilton on July 26, 1838, when she was 17, according to church records published by Cather and Milmine. Eddy had written in her autobiography in 1891 that she was 12 when this happened, and that she had discussed the idea of predestination with the pastor during the examination for her membership; this may have been an attempt to mirror the story of a 12-year-old Jesus in the Temple.Template:Sfn

Marriage, widowhood

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Eddy in the 1850s

Eddy was badly affected by four deaths in the 1840s.Template:Sfn She regarded her brother Albert as a teacher and mentor, but he died in 1841. In 1844, her first husband George Washington Glover (a friend of her brother Samuel) died after six months of marriage. They had married in December 1843 and set up home in Charleston, South Carolina, where Glover had business, but he died of yellow fever in June 1844 while living in Wilmington, North Carolina. Eddy was with him in Wilmington, six months pregnant. She had to make her way back to New Hampshire, Template:Convert by train and steamboat, where her only child George Washington Glover II was born on September 12 in her father's home.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

Her husband's death, the journey back, and the birth left her physically and mentally exhausted, and she ended up bedridden for months.Template:Sfn As Eddy was unable to care for him, her son was nursed by a local woman while Eddy herself was cared for by a household servant.Template:Sfn

Eddy's mother died in November 1849. Her mother's death was then followed three weeks later by the death of Eddy's fiancé, lawyer John Bartlett.Template:Sfn

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Elizabeth Patterson Duncan Baker, Mark Baker's second wife

Eddy's father Mark Baker remarried in 1850; his second wife Elizabeth Patterson Duncan (d. June 6, 1875) had been widowed twice, and had some property and income from her second marriage.Template:Sfn Baker apparently made clear to Eddy that her son would not be welcome in the new marital home.Template:Sfn

Early influences

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Study with Phineas Quimby

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Phineas Parkhurst Quimby

Eddy married Dr. Daniel Patterson, a dentist, in 1853.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Mesmerism had become popular in New England; and on October 14, 1861, Patterson, wrote to mesmerist Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, who reportedly cured people without medicine, asking if he could cure his wife.Template:Sfn Quimby replied that he had too much work in Portland, Maine and that he could not visit her, but if Patterson brought his wife to him he would treat her.Template:Sfn Eddy did not immediately go, instead trying the water cure at Dr. Vail's Hydropathic Institute, but her health deteriorated even further.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn A year later, in October 1862, Eddy first visited Quimby.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn She improved considerably, and publicly declared that she had been able to walk up 182 steps to the dome of city hall after a week of treatment.Template:Sfn The cures were temporary, however, and Eddy suffered relapses.Template:Sfn

Despite the temporary nature of the "cure", she attached religious significance to it, which Quimby did not.Template:Sfn Eddy believed that it was the same type of healing performed by Christ Jesus, who, unlike Quimby, administered no medicine or material means in his healings.Template:Sfn From 1862 to 1865, Quimby and Eddy engaged in lengthy discussions about healing methods like hydropathy practiced by Quimby and others.Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn She took notes on her own views of healing, as well as writing dictations from him and "correcting" them with her own ideas, some of which possibly ended up in the "Quimby manuscripts" that were published later and attributed to him. Furthering the case that Eddy had likely written large portions of Quimby's manuscripts, Quimby was notably "illiterate" and would never have had the ability to write his ideas down himself.<ref name="Quimby Illiteracy">Template:Cite news</ref>Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Despite Quimby not being especially religious, he embraced the religious connotations Eddy was bringing to his work since he knew his more religious patients would appreciate it.Template:Sfn Phineas Quimby died on January 16, 1866, shortly after Eddy's father.Template:Efn

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Eddy around 1864

J. Gordon Melton has argued "certainly Eddy shared some ideas with Quimby. She differed with him in some key areas, however, such as specific healing techniques. Moreover, she did not share Quimby's hostility toward the Bible and Christianity."Template:Sfn Biographer Gillian Gill has disagreed with other scholars arguing they "have flouted the evidence and shown willful bias in accusing Mrs. Eddy of owing her theory of healing to Quimby and of plagiarizing his unpublished work."Template:Sfn

1866 fall

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On February 1, 1866, while living in Lynn, Massachusetts, Eddy slipped and fell on a patch of ice. A contemporary account by the Lynn Reporter stated:Template:Sfn

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When Georgine Milmine interviewed Dr. Cushing forty years later, he stated that his records from the time documented that Eddy was in a "semi-hysterical" intense emotional state which subsided after she was given a small amount of morphine.Template:Sfn

On February 14, 1866, the day after Eddy finished her care with Dr. Cushing, Eddy wrote to Julius Dresser, another patient of Phineas Quimby, claiming that her injury and her subsequent medical care had undone all of the healing that Quimby had done before, and requested that he heal her. Dresser refused, stating that he was not enough to take on the burden of healing, and urged Eddy to instead spread Quimby's teachings further. Eddy would later credit her accident as her moment of spiritual revelation and the "falling apple" that led to her discovery of Christian Science. She claimed that after rejecting the medicines offered to her by her doctor, she opened her Bible three days after her fall and returned to full health after reading of Jesus healing the sick.Template:Sfn

Spiritualism

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Photograph of Daniel Patterson
Daniel Patterson

Eddy separated from her second husband Daniel Patterson in 1866, after which she boarded for four years with several families in Lynn, Massachusetts and elsewhere. Frank Podmore wrote:

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Eddy in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1871

According to Peel, spiritualists were "eager to claim her as one of their own."Template:Sfn After she became well known, reports surfaced that Eddy had been a medium years earlier in Boston and St. Louis.Template:Sfn However, at the time when she was said to be a medium there, she lived some distance away in North Groton, where she was bedridden.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn According to Gill, Eddy knew spiritualists and took part in some of their activities, but was never a convinced believer.Template:Sfn For example, she visited her friend Sarah Crosby in 1864, who believed in Spiritualism. According to Sibyl Wilbur, Eddy attempted to show Crosby the folly of it by pretending to channel Eddy's dead brother Albert and writing letters which she attributed to him.Template:Sfn In regard to the deception, biographer Hugh Evelyn Wortham stated "Mrs. Eddy's followers explain it all as a pleasantry on her part to cure Mrs. Crosby of her credulous belief in spiritualism."Template:Sfn However, Martin Gardner has argued against this, stating that Eddy was working as a spiritualist medium and was convinced by the messages. According to Gardner, Eddy's mediumship converted Crosby to Spiritualism.Template:Sfn

Photograph of Sarah Crosby
Sarah Crosby

In one of her spiritualist trances to Crosby, Eddy gave a message that was supportive of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, stating "P. Quimby of Portland has the spiritual truth of diseases. You must imbibe it to be healed. Go to him again and lean on no material or spiritual medium."Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn The paragraph that included this quote was later omitted from an official sanctioned biography of Eddy.Template:Sfn

Between 1866 and 1870, Eddy boarded at the home of Brene Paine Clark who was interested in Spiritualism.Template:Sfn Seances were often conducted there, but Eddy and Clark engaged in vigorous, good-natured arguments about them.Template:Sfn Eddy's arguments against Spiritualism convinced at least one other who was there at the time—Hiram Crafts—that "her science was far superior to spirit teachings."Template:Sfn Clark's son George tried to convince Eddy to take up Spiritualism, but he said that she abhorred the idea.Template:Sfn According to Cather and Milmine, Richard Hazeltine attended seances at Clark's home, and Eddy had acted as a trance medium, claiming to channel the spirits of the Apostles.Template:Sfn

Mary Gould, a Spiritualist from Lynn, claimed that one of the spirits that Eddy channeled was Abraham Lincoln. According to eyewitness reports cited by Cather and Milmine, Eddy was still attending séances as late as 1872.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn In these later séances, Eddy would attempt to convert her audience into accepting Christian Science.Template:Sfn Eddy showed extensive familiarity with Spiritualist practice,Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn but she denounced it in later Christian Science writings.Template:Sfn Historian Ann Braude wrote that there were similarities between Spiritualism and Christian Science, but the main difference was that Eddy came to believe, after she founded Christian Science, that spirit manifestations had never really had bodies to begin with, because matter is unreal and that all that really exists is spirit, before and after death.Template:Sfn

In the fiftieth edition of her book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, published in 1891, Eddy added the chapter, Christian Science and Spiritualism. This chapter was renamed in 1910 to Christian Science versus Spiritualism. <ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref>

Building a church

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File:Mary Baker Eddy stipple engraving circa 1924 - MET DP846163 (cropped).jpg
Mary Baker Eddy stipple engraving Template:Circa by Ernest Haskell

Eddy divorced Daniel Patterson for adultery in 1873.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> She published her work in 1875 in a book entitled Science and Health (years later retitled Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures) which she called the textbook of Christian Science, after several years of offering her healing method. The first publication run was 1,000 copies, which she self-published. During these years, she taught what she considered the science of "primitive Christianity" and the "lost art of healing" to at least 800 people.Template:Sfn Many of her students became healers themselves. The last 100 pages of Science and Health (chapter entitled "Fruitage") contains testimonies of people who affirm to have been healed by reading her book. She made numerous revisions to her book from the time of its first publication until shortly before her death.Template:Sfn

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Asa Gilbert Eddy (1826–1882)

In January 1877, Eddy spurned an approach from one of her students, Daniel Spofford. She then married another student of hers, Asa Gilbert Eddy.Template:Sfn On January 1, 1877, the two were wed, and she became Mary Baker Eddy in a small ceremony presided over by a Unitarian minister.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

In 1881, Mary Baker Eddy started the Massachusetts Metaphysical College with a charter from the state which allowed her to grant degrees.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn In Spring 1882, the Eddys moved to Boston to Massachusetts Metaphysical College.Template:Sfn Gilbert Eddy's health began to decline around this time,Template:Sfn and he died June 3 that year.Template:Sfn

File:Mary Baker Eddy cph.3b20582.jpg
Mary Baker G. Eddy in later years

Eddy devoted the rest of her life to the establishment of the church, writing its bylaws, The Manual of The Mother Church, and revising Science and Health. By the 1870s, she was telling her students, "Some day I will have a church of my own."Template:Sfn In 1879, she and her students established the Church of Christ, Scientist,Template:Sfn "to commemorate the word and works of our Master [Jesus], which should reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing."Template:Sfn In 1881, she founded the Massachusetts Metaphysical College,Template:Sfn where she taught approximately 800 students between the years 1882 and 1889, when she closed it.Template:Sfn Eddy charged her students $300 each for tuition, a large sum for the time.Template:Sfn In 1892, at Eddy's direction, the church reorganized as The First Church of Christ, Scientist.Template:Sfn In 1894, an edifice for The First Church of Christ, Scientist was completed in Boston.Template:Sfn

Her students spread across the country practicing healing, and instructing others.Template:Citation needed Eddy authorized these students to list themselves as Christian Science Practitioners in the church's The Christian Science Journal.Template:Sfn She also founded the Christian Science Sentinel, a weekly magazine with articles about how to heal and testimonies of healing.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

When the church re-organized in 1892, Eddy was made the leader of the church as "Pastor Emeritus".Template:Sfn In 1895, she ordained the Bible and Science and Health as the pastor.Template:Sfn

Eddy founded The Christian Science Publishing Society in 1898, which became the publishing home for numerous publications launched by her and her followers.Template:Sfn In 1908, at the age of 87, she founded The Christian Science Monitor, a daily newspaper.Template:Sfn She also founded the Christian Science Journal in 1883,Template:Sfn a monthly magazine aimed at the church's members and, in 1898,Template:Sfn the Christian Science Sentinel, a weekly religious periodical written for a more general audience, and the Herald of Christian Science, a religious magazine with editions in many languages.Template:Sfn

Influences and teachings

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Malicious animal magnetism

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File:Richard Kennedy (Christian Science).jpg
Richard Kennedy

The opposite of Christian Science mental healing was the use of mental powers for destructive or selfish reasons – for which Eddy used terms such as animal magnetism, hypnotism, or mesmerism interchangeably.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn "Malicious animal magnetism", sometimes abbreviated as M.A.M., is what Catherine Albanese called "a Calvinist devil lurking beneath the metaphysical surface".Template:Sfn As there is no personal devil or evil in Christian Science, M.A.M. or mesmerism became the explanation for the problem of evil.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Eddy was concerned that a new practitioner could inadvertently harm a patient through unenlightened use of their mental powers, and that less scrupulous individuals could use them as a weapon.Template:Sfn

Animal magnetism became one of the most controversial aspects of Eddy's life. The McClure's biography spends a significant amount of time on malicious animal magnetism, which it uses to make the case that Eddy had paranoia.Template:Sfn During the Next Friends lawsuit, it was used to charge Eddy with incompetence and "general insanity".Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

According to Gillian Gill, Eddy's experience with Richard Kennedy, one of her early students, was what led her to began her examination of malicious animal magnetism.Template:Sfn Eddy had agreed to form a partnership with Kennedy in 1870, in which she would teach him how to heal, and he would take patients.Template:Sfn The partnership was rather successful at first, but by 1872 Kennedy had fallen out with his teacher and torn up their contract.Template:Sfn Although there were multiple issues raised, the main reason for the break according to Gill was Eddy's insistence that Kennedy stop "rubbing" his patient's head and solar plexus, which she saw as harmful since, as Gill states, "traditionally in mesmerism or hypnosis the head and abdomen were manipulated so that the subject would be prepared to enter into trance."Template:Sfn Kennedy clearly did believe in clairvoyance, mind reading, and absent mesmeric treatment; and after their split Eddy believed that Kennedy was using his mesmeric abilities to try to harm her and her movement.Template:Sfn

In 1882, Eddy publicly claimed that her last husband, Asa Gilbert Eddy, had died of "mental assassination".Template:Sfn Daniel Spofford was another Christian Scientist expelled by Eddy after she accused him of practicing malicious animal magnetism.Template:Sfn This gained notoriety in a case irreverently dubbed the "Second Salem Witch Trial".Template:Sfn

Later, Eddy set up "watches" for her staff to pray about challenges facing the Christian Science movement and to handle animal magnetism which arose.Template:Sfn Gill writes that Eddy got the term from the New Testament account of the garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus chastises his disciples for being unable to "watch" even for a short time; and that Eddy used it to refer to "a particularly vigilant and active form of prayer, a set period of time when specific people would put their thoughts toward God, review questions and problems of the day, and seek spiritual understanding."Template:Sfn Critics such as Georgine Milmine in Mclure's, Edwin Dakin, and John Dittemore, all claimed this was evidence that Eddy had a great fear of malicious animal magnetism; although Gilbert Carpenter, one of Eddy's staff at the time, insisted she was not fearful of it, and that she was simply being vigilant.Template:Sfn

As time went on, Eddy tried to lessen the focus on animal magnetism within the movement, and she worked to clearly define it as unreality which only had power if one conceded to it.Template:Sfn Though, it continued to play an important role in the teaching of Christian Science.Template:Sfn

The belief in malicious animal magnetism remains a part of Christian Science doctrine.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Christian Scientists use it as a specific term for a hypnotic belief in a power apart from God.Template:Sfn

Hinduism, Buddhism, or other Eastern religions

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There is some debate on the possible influence of Hinduism, Buddhism, or other Eastern religions on Eddy and her work.Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn The 33rd edition of Science and Health referenced the Bhagavad-Gita, which according to Gillian Gill was likely added by James Henry Wiggin, who worked as an editor for Eddy, however Eddy removed all references to Eastern religions in 1891.Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn According to Stephen Gottschalk, Eddy consciously distinguished Christian Science from Eastern religions starting in the mid-1880s.Template:Sfn According to Claire Badaracco, "Eddy knew little about" these religions.Template:Sfn Damodar Singhal however believes that there were the "echoes" of Vedanta in her work, whether Eddy was directly influenced by Hindu philosophy or not.Template:Sfn

British Israelism

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Template:See also Eddy was introduced to British Israelism by Julia Field-King, who herself was introduced by the writings of C. A. L. Totten. Totten alleged to have traced Queen Victoria's genealogy to King David and Field-King offered to create a genealogy tracing Eddy to King David. Eddy eventually requested Field-King cease work on the genealogy and transferred her to London to work on expanding the church there.Template:Sfn Since her death, academics have debated the extent of Eddy's relationship with British Israelism with Christian Scientist historian Robert Peel arguing she was "intrigued by the theory for several years," while keeping "it resolutely out of her work and her writing on Christian Science." He acknowledges she uses the term "Anglo-Israel" in one poem, but argues the meaning is "metaphorical" instead of "ethnic or historical."Template:Sfn

Political Scientist Michael Barkun argued that "Eddy continued to maintain an interest in British-Israelism, although she kept it out of her doctrinal writings" and noted that a "schismatic offshoot" organized by Annie Cecelia Bill in England after Eddy's death centered on British-Israelism.Template:Sfn Professor of religious studies John K. Simmons, citing Peel, argued that Eddy "gave the theory no real credence, at least in verifiable written form," but acknowledged British-Israelism "seemed to attract the turn-of-the-century metaphysical crowd."Template:Sfn

Later life and death

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Use of medicine

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File:Calvin A. Frye cph.3b20581.jpg
Calvin Frye, Eddy's personal secretary

There is controversy about how much Eddy used morphine. Biographers Ernest Sutherland Bates and Edwin Franden Dakin described Eddy as a morphine addict.Template:Sfn Miranda Rice, a friend and close student of Eddy, told a newspaper in 1906: "I know that Mrs. Eddy was addicted to morphine in the seventies."Template:Sfn A diary kept by Calvin Frye, Eddy's personal secretary, suggests that Eddy occasionally reverted to "the old morphine habit" when she was in pain.Template:Sfn Gill writes that the prescription of morphine was normal medical practice at the time, and that "I remain convinced that Mary Baker Eddy was never addicted to morphine."Template:Sfn

Eddy recommended to her son that, rather than go against the law of the state, he should have her grandchildren vaccinated. She also paid for a mastectomy for her sister-in-law.Template:Sfn Eddy used glasses for several years for very fine print, but later dispensed with them almost entirely, claiming she could read fine print with ease.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn In 1907, Arthur Brisbane interviewed Eddy. At one point he picked up a periodical, selected at random a paragraph, and asked Eddy to read it. According to Brisbane, at the age of eighty six, she read the ordinary magazine type without glasses.Template:Sfn Towards the end of her life she was frequently attended by physicians.Template:Sfn

Next Friends lawsuit

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Template:Main In 1907, the New York World sponsored a lawsuit, known as "The Next Friends suit", which journalist Erwin Canham described as "designed to wrest from [Eddy] and her trusted officials all control of her church and its activities."Template:Sfn During the course of the legal case, four psychiatrists interviewed Eddy, then 86 years old, to determine whether she could manage her own affairs, and concluded that she was able to.Template:Sfn Physician Allan McLane Hamilton told The New York Times that the attacks on Eddy were the result of "a spirit of religious persecution that has at last quite overreached itself", and that "there seems to be a manifest injustice in taxing so excellent and capable an old lady as Mrs. Eddy with any form of insanity."Template:Sfn

A 1907 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association noted that Eddy exhibited hysterical and psychotic behavior.Template:Sfn Psychiatrist Karl Menninger in his book The Human Mind (1927) cited Eddy's paranoid delusions about malicious animal magnetism as an example of a "schizoid personality".Template:Sfn

Psychologists Leon Joseph Saul and Silas L. Warner, in their book The Psychotic Personality (1982), came to the conclusion that Eddy had diagnostic characteristics of Psychotic Personality Disorder (PPD).Template:Sfn In 1983, psychologists Theodore Barber and Sheryl C. Wilson suggested that Eddy displayed traits of a fantasy prone personality.Template:Sfn

Psychiatrist George Eman Vaillant wrote that Eddy was hypochrondriacal.Template:Sfn Psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel has written that Eddy's lifelong secret morphine habit contributed to her development of "progressive paranoia".Template:Sfn

Death

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File:Mary Baker Eddy monument in Mt. Auburn Cemetery (00316p)2.jpg
Monument to Eddy in Mount Auburn Cemetery

Eddy died of pneumonia on the evening of December 3, 1910, at her home at 400 Beacon Street, in the Chestnut Hill section of Newton, Massachusetts. Her death was announced the next morning, when a city medical examiner was called in.Template:Sfn She was buried on December 8, 1910, at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her open-air mausoleum was designed by New York architect Egerton Swartwout (1870–1943).<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Legacy

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A bronze memorial relief of Eddy by Lynn sculptor Reno Pisano was unveiled in December 2000, at the corner of Market Street and Oxford Street in Lynn, Massachusetts, near the site of her fall in 1866.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

In 1995, Eddy was elected to the National Women’s Hall of Fame as the first American woman to have founded a worldwide religion.<ref name="Mary Baker Eddy">Template:Cite news</ref>

Eddy was named one of the "100 Most Significant Americans of All Time" in 2014 by Smithsonian Magazine,Template:Sfn and her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures was ranked as one of the "75 Books by Women Whose Words Have Changed the World" by the Women's National Book Association in 1992.Template:Sfn

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Residences

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In 1921, on the 100th anniversary of Eddy's birth, a 100-ton (in rough) and 60–70 tons (hewn) pyramid with a Template:Convert footprint was dedicated on the site of her birthplace in Bow, New Hampshire.Template:Sfn A gift from James F. Lord, it was dynamited in 1962 by order of the church's board of directors. Also demolished was Eddy's former home in Pleasant View, as the Board feared that it was becoming a place of pilgrimage.Template:Sfn Eddy is featured on a New Hampshire historical marker (number 105) along New Hampshire Route 9 in Concord, New Hampshire.Template:Sfn

Several of Eddy's homes are owned and maintained as historic sites by the Longyear Museum and may be visited (the list below is arranged by date of her occupancy):<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

  • 1855–1860 – Hall's Brook Road, North Groton, New Hampshire
  • 1860–1862 – Stinson Lake Road, Rumney, New Hampshire
  • 1865–1866 – 23 Paradise Road, Swampscott, Massachusetts<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
  • 1868,1870 – 277 Main Street, Amesbury, Massachusetts
  • 1868–1870 – 133 Central Street, Stoughton, Massachusetts
  • 1875–1882 – 8 Broad Street, Lynn, Massachusetts (NRHP-listed in 2021)
  • 1889–1892 – 62 North State Street, Concord, New Hampshire (NRHP-listed in 1982)
  • 1908–1910 – 400 Beacon Street, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts (NRHP-listed in 1986)

Selected works

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Source: "Writings" via the Mary Baker Eddy Library.

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See also

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Notes

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Citations

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Sources

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Further reading

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