EDDY, MARY BAKER

(1821-1910), religious leader and author; 6. Bow, near Concord, N. H.; d. Chestnut Hill, Ma . She founded the Christian Science denomination, setting forth its tenets in Science and Health, the work on which her fame rests. Her family belonged to the Congregational Church and her early education in part was derived from private tuition by a pastor of that denomination. Later she discarded its doctrines. She was married three times, to Major George W. Glover in 1843, to Dr. Daniel S. Patters on in 1853, and to Asa Gilbert Eddy in 1877. Between 1844 and 1853 her writings in periodicals began to attract attention. During this period she also served as a teacher at Tilton (N. H.) Academy and opened a kindergarten school. Her Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, serving as the textbook of Christian Science, was written as a result of a long period of illne . In 1862, when a confirmed invalid through nervous disorders, she consulted a mental healer, Dr. P. P. Quimby, and was so benefited that she studied the proce and later practised it herself. She had long been trying to trace all physical effects to a mental cause, and in 1866 concluded that all causation was mind and every effect a mental phenomenon. She could not find a publisher for Science and Health, and finally printed (1,000 copies) at her own cost in 1875. Its publication was followed by the formation of the First Church of Christ in Boston, in 1879. In 1881 she established the Ma achusetts Metaphysical College in Boston for the training of Christian Science practitioners in mental healing. She remained the active leader of the creed almost to her death, despite an attempt in 1907 by legal steps to show that she was then mentally incompetent. Her chief publications, in addition to Science and Health, were People’s Idea of God, 1886; Christian Healing; Retrospection and Introspection; Uniiy of Good; Rudimental Divine Science; No and Yes; Church Manuel; Christian Science versus Pantheism; Pulpit and Pre ; Poems; The First Church of Christ, Scientist; and Miscellany, 1913.