Mary Baker Eddy

(1821 - 1910)

After experimenting with homeopathy and receiving hypnosis from a leader of the New Thought movement named Phineas P. Quimby, Mary Baker Eddy in 1866 fell on a patch of ice in Lynn, Massachusetts, and purportedly sustained serious injuries. Through her subsequent recovery she discovered “the Science of divine metaphysical healing,” which she believed to be the healing science employed by Jesus Christ. In defense of her discovery she wrote, “The discords of corporeal sense must yield to the harmony of spiritual sense.” Eddy founded the first Christian Science Church in 1879 and the daily international newspaper The Christian Science Monitor in 1908, two years before she died at the age of eighty-nine.