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Mary Baker Eddy, 1821-1900
Born Bow, New Hampshire
A spontaneous recovery from a serious spinal injury convinced Mary Baker Eddy that illness was not real, and she built a new Christian theology on the idea that all reality was spiritual and all physical matter was an illusion. The cure for evil, especially sickness and disease, she wrote, would come about by spiritual means. By the 1890s Eddy had centralized her new religion of Christian Science in Boston. A national newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor, was established in 1908. Membership grew from almost 9,000 in 1890 to about 270,000 in 1936, and spread to Europe and Asia.
Luella Varney Serrao, 1889 |