Mary Baker Eddy Founded a Church That Rejected Medicine and a Pulitzer-Winning Newspaper

On a February afternoon in 1866, a 44-year-old New Hampshire-born invalid named Mary Baker Patterson — later Eddy — slipped on a patch of ice in Lynn, Massachusetts, and was carried home with what her doctors said were probably terminal injuries. Three days later, she opened a Bible to a passage about Jesus healing a paralytic, by her own account closed it, and walked. The experience set her on a thirty-year project of trying to write down what had happened. The result, published in 1875, was Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. The text was a dense, idiosyncratic theological argument that the material world was an illusion, that physical disease was an error of belief, and that prayer alone — properly applied — could correct it.

Eddy chartered the Church of Christ (Scientist) with twenty-six followers in 1879, reorganized it as the Church of Christ, Scientist in 1892, and oversaw the building of the Mother Church on the Back Bay in Boston, completed in 1894. The denomination forbade most medical treatment. It still does, with carefully circumscribed exceptions for childbirth, dentistry, and broken bones. Several decades of legal cases involving Christian Science children dying of treatable conditions have gradually narrowed the legal exemptions in U.S. statute.

In 1908, at age 87, Eddy founded The Christian Science Monitor as a non-proselytizing daily newspaper to counter what she saw as the sensationalism of the Hearst press. The paper has won seven Pulitzer Prizes between 1950 and 2002, gone through several near-extinction events, and now publishes mostly online. It has consistently been more respected than the church it funds. Eddy died in 1910, leaving an estate valued at $1.5 million. Membership in the church peaked at roughly 270,000 in 1936 and has been falling for nearly a century.