Volume 43, Number 12 · July 11, 1996
Mrs. Eddy Builds Her Empire
By Caroline Fraser
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures
by Mary Baker Eddy
The First Church of Christ, Scientist, 700 pp., $18.00
'With Bleeding Footsteps': Mary Baker Eddy's Path to Religious Leadership
by Robert David Thomas
Knopf, 363 pp., $27.50
Christian Science
by Mark Twain
Prometheus Books, 196 pp., $15.95
The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy & the History of Christian Science
by Willa Cather, by Georgine Milmine
University of Nebraska Press/A Bison Book, 501 pp., $14.95
Americans have always been besotted with the power of the individual. This preoccupation has taken many forms—political, social, and religious—but one form has survived virtually intact, changing only the superficial spots of its rhetoric: the notion that everyone has the power to heal himself of whatever physical, fiscal, or spiritual ills ail him. It appears in both religious and secular movements. Virtually all these movements proclaim their distinctiveness and rely on the anecdotal testimonials of their believers to support their claims. Recently published books with titles like Remarkable Recovery, Perfect Health, and Spontaneous Healing,[1] about so-called natural healing, spontaneous remission, and the 'mind-body connection,' are only the latest examples of a phenomenon that has been known as New Age, New Thought, Mental Science, mind-cure, and the power of positive thinking. And virtually every twentieth-century book or sect that promotes healing through the power of mind is in some ways a repackaging of the work of one woman, Mary Baker Eddy, the self-proclaimed 'Discoverer and Founder' of Christian Science and the author of Science and Health.
Review, 8150 words
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