Mary Baker Eddy

Her father farmed in Bow, New Hampshire, and quarreled with everyone: a strict Calvinist whom one neighbor called a tiger for a temper, and who by two of her biographers' account set out to break his youngest child's will. From girlhood she had spells. Neighbors described her dropping to the floor writhing and screaming, or lying silent for hours. Caroline Fraser judged the cause psychogenic. Then the 1840s emptied the house around her. Her brother Albert, whom she treated as a mentor, died in 1841. In June 1844 her first husband died of yellow fever in Wilmington, North Carolina, leaving her six months pregnant and 1,400 miles from home. She made the trip by train and steamboat, bore a son, and went to bed for months.

On the evening of February 1, 1866, she slipped on ice at the corner of Market and Oxford Streets in Lynn, Massachusetts, and was carried insensible into a stranger's house. She later dated the whole of Christian Science to what came next: a Bible opened three days later to Jesus healing the sick, and a recovery she credited to nothing material. Science and Health followed in 1875, self-published in a run of 1,000 copies and revised for the rest of her life. She and her students organized the Church of Christ, Scientist in 1879 and chartered the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in 1881, teaching some 800 students at 300 dollars a course. She founded a monthly magazine in 1883, a publishing house and two more periodicals in 1898, and in 1908, at 87, a daily newspaper.

A religion founded on the unreality of matter kept colliding with matter. Eddy wore glasses for fine print for years, paid for a sister-in-law's mastectomy, told her son to have his children vaccinated rather than break state law, and was attended by physicians toward the end. The morphine question has never closed: Ernest Sutherland Bates and Edwin Dakin called her an addict, a former student said flatly in 1906 that she had been one in the 1870s, and Gillian Gill, working the same papers, concluded she never was. She also built a doctrine around malicious animal magnetism, mesmerism directed at her by enemies. In 1882 she said publicly that her third husband had died of mental assassination. She expelled a student for practicing it in a case the press called a second Salem witch trial.

She died of pneumonia on the evening of December 3, 1910, at 400 Beacon Street in Chestnut Hill, and the announcement waited for morning, when a city medical examiner was called. Her own church has been hardest on her traces. A 100-ton granite pyramid raised on the Bow birthplace for her centenary in 1921 was dynamited in 1962 by order of the board of directors, which also pulled down her Pleasant View house to keep it from becoming a place of pilgrimage. The newspaper outlived all of it. In 1995 she entered the National Women's Hall of Fame as the first American woman to have founded a worldwide religion.

Mary Baker Eddy's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures book
  Self-published in a first run of 1,000 and revised for 35 years 1875
• The Church of Christ, Scientist company
  Reorganized in 1892 as The First Church of Christ, Scientist 1879
• Massachusetts Metaphysical College company
  State-chartered to grant degrees. About 800 students before it closed in 1889 1881
• The Christian Science Journal company
  A monthly for the membership 1883
• Manual of The Mother Church book
  The bylaws that still govern the denomination 1895
• The Christian Science Monitor company
  A daily newspaper begun when she was 87 1908

• July 16, 1821 aged 0 Born Mary Morse Baker in a farmhouse at Bow, New Hampshire The youngest of six children of Mark and Abigail Baker.
• June 1844 aged 22 Her first husband dies of yellow fever in Wilmington, North Carolina She was six months pregnant and traveled 1,400 miles home by train and steamboat.
• September 12, 1844 aged 23 Her only child, George Washington Glover II, is born She was left bedridden for months, and the boy was nursed by a local woman.
• October 1862 aged 41 First visits the mesmerist Phineas Quimby in Portland, Maine She improved, then relapsed. Whether she owed her system to him has been argued ever since.
• February 1, 1866 aged 44 Falls on ice in Lynn, Massachusetts The Lynn Reporter called her injuries internal and severe. She later dated her discovery to the days that followed.
• 1875 aged ~54 Publishes Science and Health at her own expense
• 1879 aged ~58 Organizes the Church of Christ, Scientist with her students
• 1907 aged ~86 The New York World sponsors the Next Friends suit against her Four psychiatrists examined her at 86 and concluded she could manage her own affairs.
• December 3, 1910 aged 89 Dies of pneumonia at Chestnut Hill Buried five days later at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

• Joseph Smith 1805–1844
  Founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, one of the most consequential religions to originate in the United States. founded an American religion before her
• Willa Cather 1873–1947
  Novelist whose work made immigrant settlement and the Great Plains central subjects of American literature. wrote the hostile biography
• Mark Twain 1835–1910
  Author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, often called the father of American literature. attacked her in print
• William James 1842–1910
  Founded American psychology as a discipline and shaped pragmatist philosophy at Harvard. studied the mind-cure movement she led
• Aimee Semple McPherson 1890–1944
  Evangelist and media innovator who founded the Foursquare Church and pioneered religious broadcasting and celebrity ministry. the next woman to build a church and a newsroom
• L. Ron Hubbard 1911–1986
  Science-fiction writer who founded Scientology, creating a controversial and internationally influential American religious movement. later founder on comparable ground