Mary Baker Eddy

Bow, New Hampshire

Tilton, New Hampshire

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.

From 1888 to 1892, Eddy moved around various towns in New England, first to Barre, Vermont, then to Concord, finally ending up in a Boston suburb. In June 1892, Eddy, along with Calvin Frye and her servants, moved in to an estate named Pleasant View which she had remodeled, and where she would operate a working farm. In the opinion of biographer Caroline Fraser, Eddy became "more haughty in manner and autocratic" at Pleasant View, frequently criticizing her servants for their "ignorance of the methods of animal magnetism". Many Christian Scientists would travel to Pleasant View during this period to see Eddy, who would address them from her balcony once a year.

Use of medicine

In Science and Health, Eddy established the principle of "radical reliance", which implied that Christian Scientists should fully eschew medicine in favor of Eddy's methods, stating that

"on this fundamental point, timid conservatism is absolutely inadmissible. Only through radical reliance on Truth can scientific healing power be

realized." However, as Eddy's use of medicine became public, she had to reconcile this with her doctrines, formulating several exceptions to the principle of radical reliance. On December 2, 1900, the Boston Herald reported on a lecture at the Episcopal Congress in Boston where Eddy was criticized for stating that she was able to cure bone diseases despite having gone to a dentist to have teeth pulled, to which Eddy responded in the same issue. Shortly thereafter, Eddy publicly announced that Christian Scientists would be allowed to visit dentists, a policy which remains to this day.

In 1905, Eddy wrote in a new edition of Science and Health that allowed Christian Scientists afflicted by severe pain which they were not able to treat themselves to "call a surgeon, who would give him a hypodermic injection", following bouts of severe pain as a result of kidney stones. There is controversy about how much Eddy used morphine. Biographers Ernest Sutherland Bates and Edwin Franden Dakin described Eddy as a morphine addict. 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." 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. 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."

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. Eddy used glasses for several years for very fine print, but later said she had dispensed with them almost entirely and could read fine print with ease. In 1907, Arthur Brisbane interviewed Eddy. At one point, he picked up a periodical, selected a paragraph at random, and asked Eddy to read it. According to Brisbane, at the age of eighty-six, she read the ordinary magazine type without glasses. Towards the end of her life, she was frequently attended by physicians.

Family

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.

Next Friends lawsuit

In her final years, Eddy became increasingly reclusive, with sources differing on her physical state and to what extent she remained lucid during this period, which led to frequent, often embellished, rumors in the press about Eddy's behavior and well-being.

In 1906, the New York World had run a story falsely asserting that Eddy was dying of cancer, with her household and finances under the control of Calvin Frye.

A year later, the newspaper 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."

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. 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."

A 1907 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association noted that Eddy exhibited hysterical and psychotic behavior. 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". Psychologists Leon Joseph Saul and Silas L. Warner, in their book The Psychotic Personality (1982), concluded that Eddy had diagnostic characteristics of psychotic personality disorder (PPD). In 1983, psychologists Theodore Barber and Sheryl C. Wilson suggested that Eddy displayed traits of a fantasy prone personality. Psychiatrist George Eman Vaillant wrote that Eddy was hypochondriacal. Psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel has written that Eddy's lifelong secret morphine habit contributed to her development of "progressive paranoia".