EDDY, MARY BAKER

Founder of the christian science church; b. Bow, N.H., July 16, 1821; d. Chestnut Hill, Mass., Dec. 3,1910. After a childhood marked by poor health, she married George Washington Glover in 1843. His death and the birth of her son, in 1844, aggravated her nervous disorder. She married Dr. Daniel Patterson, an itinerant dentist, in 1853, but she received a divorce in 1873 on the grounds of desertion. She was wed for a third time, in 1877, to Asa Gilbert Eddy, a sewing machine salesman who died in 1882.

Mrs. Eddy dated her discovery of the principles of Christian Science from 1866 when she recovered from a fall in Lynn, Mass. She began to teach classes in spiritual healing, borrowing freely from the writings of Dr. Phineas P. Quimby, a healer and mesmerist. Her Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the textbook of the Christian Science Church, was published in 1875, and the first Christian Science Church was organized in Boston, Mass., in 1879. In 1880 she established the short-lived Massachusetts Metaphysical College to propagate her theories of healing. The official church publication, the Christian Science Journal, was founded in 1883, and a

daily newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor, was begun in 1908. At the time of her death, the church had enrolled about 100,000 members. Its doctrines denied the reality of sin, sickness, and death and advanced a pantheistic conception of God.

Bibliography: e. f. dakin, Mrs. Eddy: The Biography of a Virginal Mind (New York 1930). l. p. powell, Mary Baker Eddy (Boston 1950). a. johnson, Dictionary of American Biography 6:7–15.

[w. j. whalen]