Some
books can change your life. This is one of them! Every day people find
practical, spiritual answers for health and healing, security, and
lasting relationships in Science and Health -- a reference book for
life!
The author, Mary Baker Eddy, devoted more than four decades to refining
this message of hope, healing, comfort and spiritual strength. First
published in 1875, this book has a 125-year history of inspiring and
healing readers worldwide. It is published in English and in 16
different bilingual translations and has sold more than ten million
copies.
Mary
Baker Eddy, the Founder of the Christian Science movement, is widely
recognized outside her Church as one of the most remarkable religious
figures of modern times. Her
childhood and much of her adult life, before 1862, was spent in ill
health. Although raised with Puritan values, daily Bible reading, and
even the talk of God's healing power, she spent many years looking for
healing in the many remedial methods available in her time. She became a
patient of the New England healer Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, whose
"medicine-free" healing techniques undoubtedly influenced her
greatly.
When
she first visited Dr. Quimby in 1862 she was a virtual invalid, and with
the good doctor's help her health quickly improved. While
under his care, off and on for several years, she became deeply
interested in his theory of disease and its cure. She heard many of his
essays read, and wrote many herself which she submitted to him for
inspection and correction. She began to give some public lectures on his
healing system in Maine. After
Quimby's death in 1866, Mrs. Eddy continued to teach the new ideas and
methods, as one of his followers until the period of her more public
work.
A
few weeks after Quimby's death, Mrs. Eddy fell over on a sidewalk and
struck her back on the ice, and was taken up for dead. She came to
consciousness amid a storm of vapors from cologne, chloroform, ether,
camphor, etc., to find herself the helpless cripple she was before she
saw Dr. Quimby. Feeling that she had not long to live, she asked for her
Bible, and whilst reading an account of one of Jesus' healings, she felt
God's presence very strongly and shortly afterwards rose from her sick
bed.
"The
physician attending said I had taken the last step I ever should, but in
two days I got out of bed alone
and will
walk; but yet I confess I am frightened . . . I think that I could help
another in my condition if they had not placed their intelligence in
matter. This I have not done, and yet I am slowly failing." writes
Mrs. Eddy in a letter to Mr. Julius Dresser, a fellow patient that was
healed by Quimby. In the same letter she asked Mr. Dresser whether he
could help her overcome the present physical difficulties caused by her
accident, as she believed that he could and was best fitted to take up
where Quimby left off. Mr. Dresser did not respond to this appeal, and
Mrs. Eddy had to depend on her own interpretation of Quimby's method.
She recovered her health, however, and marked this period as the time
that she came to fully understand the "Science of
Christianity," which she named Christian Science�A term that had
been used by Dr. Quimby on at least one occasion.