Ĭhristian Science contends that illness is an illusion caused by faulty beliefs, and that prayer heals by replacing bad thoughts with good ones. Her writings contain many contradictions. In her determination to justify herself on all counts, she frequently twisted evidence and facts to her purposes. She could not bear to be contradicted or found wrong.

She demanded absolute obedience to her system as well as to her person. She claimed to be able to perform miracles and said she had healed many people with crippling disabilities. Mary Baker Eddy represented herself as the supreme healer and as infallible as Christ. The Church of Christ, Scientist was founded in 1879. In 1877 she married for the third time, becoming Mary Baker Eddy, and named her new philosophy Christian Science. She said that God was the author and that she was only the writer. She concluded, however, that her cure was not due to Quimby but to “truth in Christ.” In 1875 she published Science and Health, which described her theories about religion based on the Bible and some of Quimby’s ideas. On awakening from her trance Glover found herself cured. The water massage and hypnotism that he used reportedly had a positive effect. In 1862, Quimby treated Mary Baker Glover for a spinal problem that had failed to respond to orthodox medical care. He professed that conventional medicine was useless, that disease itself was “error,” and that only health was “truth.” He claimed that diagnosis and cure resulted from the individual’s faith in him.

Quimby would place his hands on a sick patient’s head and abdomen and encourage supposed magnetic healing forces to flow through them. In about 1850, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby of Maine used Anton Mesmer’s ideas of animal magnetism to develop his own healing approach.

Christian science science and health