|
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
| biography |
classifications |
major works |
cross references |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
biography
| name: |
Eddy, Mary Baker
|
| |
married name Glover
|
| sex:
| female
|
| lived:
| (1821–1910)
|
| biography:
| Founder of the Church of Christ and Scientist, born in Bow, New Hampshire, USA. Rather sickly and emotionally unstable as a child, she showed an early interest in poetry and religion. In 1843 she married George Washington Glover but he died within seven months and their son was raised by foster parents. During the next decade she taught school occasionally but she was mostly preoccupied with the basic concerns of her life: medical problems, her own writings, and spiritual issues. In 1853 she married dentist Dr Daniel Patterson, but her medical and psychological condition left her virtually an invalid. In 1862 she went to Portland, ME to seek relief from Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–66), a self-taught ‘healer’ who had come up with his own ‘science of health’. With its emphasis on the mental approach to curing all ailments, and with its strong Christian element, he effectively anticipated many of her later tenets. Two pivotal events in 1866 - Quimby's death and, while recovering from an injury, reading of Jesus's healings - led her to travel about New England for the next 10 years, promoting and writing down her new ‘Christian science’. In 1875 she took three crucial steps: she acquired a house in Lynn, MA, where she began to teach her ideas to a circle of followers; she held her first public service in a local hall; and she published the first edition of her Science and Health. She had divorced Patterson (1873), and in 1877 married Asa Gilbert Eddy, a sewing-machine salesman who would become a valued assistant as her movement spread. In 1879 the Church of Christ, Scientist was formally chartered in Massachusetts, and from then on her movement and her own role expanded greatly and she became ever more famous and wealthy. She continually revised and republished her Science and Health, adding in 1883 the Key to the Scriptures, her interpretation of the Bible. In 1889 she set up the ‘Mother Church’ in Boston to control the burgeoning movement and founded a newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor (1908). Seldom appearing in Boston or public in the final 19 years of her life, she exercised rigid control over her organization. She was constantly engaged in controversy and legal suits, from fighting off the charge that she had stolen all her ideas from Quimby (she had in fact modified them significantly), to resisting efforts by various others to take over her church. She was probably psychosomatic, certainly charismatic, but the church she founded remains a witness to her central tenet of the power of mind over matter. |
|
|
|
|
