2025, JULY 28
Mary Baker Eddy
Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist, helped establish a religious healing system that rejected medical science and claimed to restore primitive Christian healing, laying important groundwork for later divine-healing movements such as Latter Rain and the Voice of Healing revival. Influenced by Phineas Quimby's mesmerist healing theories, Spiritualist practices, and elements of Vedanta philosophy, Eddy transformed mental-healing concepts into a Christianized doctrine that treated sickness as a spiritual problem requiring Christian Science rather than medicine, even while she reportedly relied on morphine herself. Her writings, especially Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, popularized a framework in which medical treatment was discouraged or rejected, contributing to a legacy of preventable suffering, deaths, and prosecutions among followers who trusted religious healing over medical care.
