The Christian Science movement is a religious movement within Christianity founded by Mary Baker Eddy that arose in the mid to late 19th century and that led to the founding of The First Church of Christ, Scientist.

1866-1910 Mary Baker Eddy

Born Mary Morse Baker on a farm in Bow, New Hampshire, Eddy was the youngest of six children in a family of Protestant Congregationalists. Her father, Mark Baker, was a deeply religious man, although, according to one account, "Christianity to him was warfare against sin, not a religion of human brotherhood." In common with most women at the time Eddy was given little formal education, but she said she had read widely at home. From childhood she lived with protracted ill health, complaining of chronic indigestion and spinal inflammation, and according to biographers experiencing fainting spells.Eddy letter to Quimby, May 1862, in Schoepflin 2003, p. 22; Eddy, Science and Health, 1875, 1st edition, pp. 189–190. The literary critic Harold Bloom described her as "a kind of anthology of nineteenth-century nervous ailments".

Eddy's first husband died just before her 23rd birthday, six months after they married and three months before their son was born, leaving her penniless; as a result of her poor health she lost custody of the boy when he was four. Her second husband left her after 13 years of marriage; Eddy said that he had promised to become her child's legal guardian, but it is unclear whether he did, and Eddy lost contact with her son until he was in his thirties.; Gill 1998, p. 102, 170. indicates that Eddy's husband did sign the guardianship papers. M. Victor Westberg, "Christian Science: An Exchange", The New York Review of Books, November 14, 1996. (Per the legal doctrine of coverture, women in the United States could not then be their own children's guardians.) Her third husband, Asa Gilbert Eddy, died five years after they married; she believed he had been killed by malicious animal magnetism.; Gill 1998, pp. 287–289. Six years later, when she was 67 and apparently in need of loyalty and affection, she legally adopted a 41-year-old homeopath as her second son.;

Eddy was by all accounts charismatic and able to inspire great loyalty, although Gillian Gill writes that she could also be irrational and unkind. According to Bryan Wilson, she exemplified the female charismatic leader, and was viewed as the head of the Christian Science church even after her death; he wrote in 1961 that her name—Christian Scientists call her Mrs. Eddy or "our beloved Leader"—was still included in all articles published in the Christian Science journals.Wilson 1961, pp. 142, 144.

It was in part because of her unusual personality that Christian Science flourished, despite the numerous disputes she initiated among her followers. "She was like a patch of colour in those gray communities," McClure's wrote, "She never laid aside her regal air; never entered a room or left it like other people."Cather and Milmine 1909, pp. 122–123. Mark Twain, a prominent critic of hers, described her in 1907 as "vain, untruthful [and] jealous", but "[i]n several ways ... the most interesting woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary".Twain 1907, pp. 67, 180.

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby

Eddy tried every remedy for her ill health, including a three-month stay at the Vail's Hydropathic Institute in Hill, New Hampshire. She told the Boston Post in 1883 that, for the seven years prior to 1862 (most of her second marriage), she had been effectively confined to her bed or room.Willa Cather and Georgine Milmine, "Mary Baker G. Eddy: The Story of Her Life and the History of Christian Science", McClure's magazine (January 1907 – June 1908), April 1907, p. 610; .

In 1861 Eddy heard of a healing method developed by Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, a former clockmaker in Portland, Maine.. Eddy's husband, Daniel Patterson, first wrote to Quimby in October 1861. Self-styled Dr. P. P. Quimby, a practitioner of the "Science of Health," had become interested in healing after recovering suddenly from a condition he believed was consumption (tuberculosis).Craig James Hazen, The Village Enlightenment in America: Popular Religion and Science in the Nineteenth Century, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000, pp. 113–114. For "Science of Health," Quimby in Horatio Dresser (ed.), The Quimby Manuscripts, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1921, pp. 249, 340, 405; for his recovery, p. 28 (also here). After attending a lecture in Maine in 1837 by the French mesmerist Charles Poyen, Quimby began to practice mesmerism himself.Hazen 2000, p. 118. Also see Charles Poyen, Progress of Animal Magnetism in New England, Boston: Weeks, Jordan & Co, 1837. Mesmerism was named after Franz Mesmer (1734–1815), a German physician who argued for the existence of a fluid through which bodies could influence each other, a force he called animal magnetism. Quimby and an assistant, Lucius Burkmar, traveled around Maine and New Brunswick giving demonstrations; Burkmar, in a trance, would offer mind readings and suggestions for cures.George A. Quimby, "Phineas Parkhurst Quimby", The New England Magazine, 6(33), March 1888 (pp. 267–276), p. 271. Alan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1992, p. 193; Hazen 2000, pp. 118–119.

Quimby abandoned mesmerism around 1847 when he realized that it was suggestion that was effecting the apparent cures. He came to the view that disease was a mental state.Gauld 1992, p. 193; Roy M. Anker, "Romanticism, the Gilded Age and the History of Christian Science," Self-help and Popular Religion in Modern American Culture: An Interpretive Guide, Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1999(b), (pp. 11–100), p. 50; Hazen 2000, pp. 118–119. When Jesus healed a paralysed arm, he had known, Quimby wrote, "that the arm was not the cause but the effect, and he addressed Himself to the intelligence, and applied His wisdom to the cause".Quimby, in Horatio Dresser (ed.), The Quimby Manuscripts, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1921, p. 355 (also here). In so doing Jesus had relied upon Christ, a synonym for Truth, Science and God, a power that Quimby believed all human beings could access.Amanda Porterfield, Healing in the History of Christianity, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 179; Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999, pp. 213–216 (for Quimby's Jesus/Christ distinction, p. 214). Quimby referred to this idea, in February 1863, as "Christian science," a phrase he used only once in writing. He wrote:

By 1856, Quimby had 500 patients a year.; Fuller 1982, p. 121. He would sit next to them and explain that the disease was something their minds could control; sometimes he would wet his hands and rub their heads, but it was the talking that helped them, he said, not the manipulation.George Quimby 1888, p. 271. Quimby began to write his thoughts down around 1859—his work was published posthumously as The Quimby Manuscripts in 1921—and was generous in allowing his patients to copy one of his essays, "Questions and Answers."Cather and Milmine (McClure's), February 1907, pp. 344–345; . This became an issue, from 1883 onwards, when Eddy was accused of having based Christian Science on his work.Simmons 1995, p. 64; Fuller 2013, pp. 212–213, n. 16.

Eddy as Quimby's patient

When Eddy first met Quimby in Portland in October 1862, she had to be helped up the stairs to his consulting rooms.Cather and Milmine (McClure's), February 1907, pp. 347–348. She spoke highly of him the following month in a letter to the Portland Evening Courier: "This truth which he opposes to the error of giving intelligence to matter and placing pain where it never placed itself ... changes the currents of the system to their normal action ..." In a second letter she offered to supply quotations from Quimby's "theory of Christ (not Jesus).". Between then and May 1864, Eddy returned to see Quimby several times, staying for weeks in Portland and visiting him daily. She wrote to him regularly, and composed a sonnet for him, "Mid light of science sits the sage profound."Cather and Milmine (McClure's), February 1907, pp. 347–349. The sonnet was a new version of one she had had published on 13 November 1845 in the New Hampshire Patriot; see .

Eddy first used mental healing on a patient in March 1864, when one of Quimby's patients in Portland, Mary Ann Jarvis, suffered a relapse when she returned home to Warren, Maine. Eddy stayed with her for two months, giving Jarvis mental healing to ease a breathing problem, and writing to Quimby six times for absent treatment for herself. She called the latter "angel visits"; in one of her letters to Quimby, she said that she had seen him in her room. In April she gave a public lecture in Warren, contrasting mental healing with Spiritualism, entitled: "P. P. Quimby's Spiritual Science healing disease, as opposed to Deism or Rochester Rapping Spiritualism."Cather and Milmine (McClure's), February 1907, pp. 349–351; for six letters, Gill 1998, p. 148.

Fall in Lynn

On Thursday, February 1, 1866, Mary Baker Eddy, then known as Mary Patterson, fell on the ice in Lynn, Massachusetts.Milmine 1909, 84; Powell 1950, 109. She had been on the way to a Good Templars meeting, an organization supporting the temperance movement, with friends from the organization.Koestler-Grack 2004, 3; Wilbur 1908, 128 After her fall, the Lynn Reporter wrote that she was "in an insensible condition" and had internal injuries, and the notes of Dr. Alvin M. Cushing, a homeopathic doctor, who was called to the scene, state that he found Eddy "partially unconscious, semi-hysterical and complaining by word and action of severe pain in the back of her head and neck."Milmine 1909, 84. She was taken to the nearest house, that of Samuel M. Bubier the future mayor of Lynn, and spent the night there. Cushing attended to her multiple times that day and during the night, which Gill writes "indicates that he considered the accident serious,"Gill 1998, 162. and he gave orders that homeopathic medicine be continually given her at intervals of every half hour when she was awake while he was not present. Cushing later told Sibyl Wilbur that Eddy "was taken up unconscious and remained unconscious during the night" and that he thought she was "suffering from a concussion, and possible spinal dislocation."Wilbur 1908, 129.

The next morning Eddy asked to be taken to her home in Swampscott, which Cushing arranged for against his own professional advice.Studdert Kennedy 1947, 130-131; Peel 1966, 195. In order to dull the pain of moving, Cushing gave Eddy "one-eighth of a grain of morphine" (a common painkiller at the timeGill 1998, 546.) according to his notes from the period. Cushing also stated that Eddy was "a very interesting patient" who was "one of the most sensitive to the effects" of the morphine that he ever saw, and that to his surprise, the dose put her "sound asleep." Her husband Daniel Patterson was out of town at the time,Nenneman 1997, 85. but she was attended to by friends, Carrie Millett and Mary Wheeler, who took turns watching by her bedside. They told neighbors that Eddy had broken her back, was paralyzed, and possibly close to death; and at some point a call was made for a minister to come.Gill 1998, 162; Studdert Kennedy 1947, 130-131; Smith 1969, 55-56. After that Friday, Eddy apparently refused to take any more of his medicine, having lost her faith in homeopathy.Wilbur 1908, 130; Peel 1966, 196.