| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Rennie B. Schoepflin. Christian Science on Trial: Religious Healing in America. (Medicine, Science, and Religion in Historical Context.) Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 2003. Pp. 301. $39.95.
This book is a meticulously crafted and enticing chronicle of the life of Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) and the legal battles ensuing from her controversial philosophical tenets. It is at once a biography of its founder and a sociolegal history recounting how the courts were used to assert cultural hegemony against her teachings. Rennie B. Schoepflin amassed a stunning array of sources, including biographical evidence, religious and healing demographics by region and social class, charts and graphs of healers accused of crimes in various states, practitioners' correspondence, and courtroom testimony illuminating the personal and public Eddy.	1
The first part of the book explores Eddy's childhood and young adulthood, which was wracked with constant illnesses, mental despair, and religious anxieties. In her quest for relief of bodily ailments and torturous spiritual disquietude, Eddy, like countless others from the 1830s onward, fleetingly embraced various sectarian cures. She found little, or only temporary, relief, and around 1860 she adopted the mental healing techniques of Maine's Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. In the years that followed, "she constructed a myth about the origins of Christian Science that denied her dependencies and accentuated the uniqueness of her discovery" (p. 32). Eddy coupled these mental healing techniques with the spiritual relief she found through reading Gospel accounts of Jesus's healing. She proclaimed her "healing truth" by disavowing the material body's pain, relying on the mind's ability to heal through faith and scriptural devotion.	. . .

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