Mary Baker Eddy (née 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.
Born in 1821 in Bow to a Congregationalist family, Mary Morse Baker was often afflicted by unknown diseases as a child. Rejecting the Congregationalism of her family, she became influenced by the Mesmerist ideas of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, and after falling on the ice in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1866 she said she underwent a miraculous recovery through reading the Bible. In the decades after, she would teach her doctrine to many students, establishing the Christian Science movement in the 1860s and 1870s. In the 1880s, Eddy opened a college in Massachusetts, writing and lecturing widely, while managing internal conflicts and growing public scrutiny. She was the leader of the Christian Science movement until her death in 1910. Christian Scientists today honor Eddy as the "Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science", while critics view Eddy's methods as harmful and ineffective.
Eddy wrote numerous books and articles, most notably the book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, first published in 1875 and republished many times until 1910. 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.
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). She was the cousin of U.S. Representative Henry M. Baker.
She was the sixth generation of her family born in the United States. 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 the farm alongside his elder brother James when Joseph Jr. died in 1816.
A staunch Calvinist, Mark Baker was an active member of the Tilton Congregationalist Church. 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." They also stated he was an ardent supporter of slavery and a Copperhead who was reportedly pleased to hear about Abraham Lincoln's death. 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.
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; 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.
Eddy experienced periods of sudden illness. Those who knew the family described her as suddenly falling to the floor, writhing and screaming, or silent and apparently unconscious, sometimes for hours. Church of Christ, Scientist historian Robert Peel wrote that these fits would require the family to send Eddy to the village doctor.
The cause for Eddy's illness was unclear, but biographer Caroline Fraser wrote she believed the cause was most likely psychogenic in nature. 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. Fraser attributed the illness to a likely combination of hypochondria and histrionics.
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 twenty miles (32 km) north of Bow. Sanbornton Bridge was renamed in 1869 as Tilton, New Hampshire.
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.
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.
Eddy was badly affected by four deaths in the 1840s. 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 worked as a builder, but he died of yellow fever in June 1844 while living in Wilmington, North Carolina. According to Eddy, she had freed her husband's slaves upon his death, but according to Caroline Fraser there is no evidence Glover was ever a slave owner.
When Glover died, Eddy was with him in Wilmington, six months pregnant. She had to make her way back to New Hampshire, 1,400 miles (2,300 km) by train and steamboat, where her only child George Washington Glover II (1844 - 1915) was born on September 12 in her father's home. Her husband's death, the journey back, and the birth left her physically and mentally exhausted, and she ended up bedridden for months. Her son was nursed by a local woman while Eddy herself was cared for by Mahala Sanborn, a household servant.
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. 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.
Baker apparently made clear to Eddy that her son would not be welcome in the new marital home. In 1851, George Washington Glover II was sent to live permanently with Mahala Sanborn in New Hampshire, which Eddy would later attribute to a plot to separate her from her child.
There is some controversy over Eddy's relationship with her son, with Peel attributing Eddy sending George away to him being a demanding baby and intemperate child, while more critical biographers such as Fraser and Martin Gardner have written that Eddy "lacked affection" for her child, and was either unable or unwilling to care for him, Fraser writing that despite expressing grief over her son's absence "no evidence has been found to support the sympathetic assumption that Mary Glover yearned to regain custody of her son."
Eddy married Dr. Daniel Patterson, a dentist who also practiced homeopathy, in 1853. Their marriage was an unhappy one, with Patterson frequently traveling to find work leaving his chronically ill wife at home in North Groton, where the couple had moved. While bedridden, she owned a scrapbook in which she collected various newspaper clippings, recipes, remedies and other texts which she labeled "Gems of Truth" and "Dewdrops of Wisdom", and prescribed homeopathic cures to her neighbors. In 1859, the Patterson couple was evicted, and moved into a boarding house in Rumney, New Hampshire. In 1862, during the American Civil War, Patterson was tasked with delivering money to the front, but was captured at Bull Run and imprisoned, managing to escape but increasingly abandoning his wife.