Science and Health
Glover, Mary Baker. Science and Health. Boston: Christian Scientist Publishing Company, 1875.
Years after Mary Baker Eddy had founded her Church, she wrote, “The first edition of my most important work, Science and Health, containing the complete statement of Christian Science,—the term employed by me to express the divine, or spiritual, Science of Mind-healing, was published in 1875” (Eddy, Retrospection, 37). The greatest difference between this first edition and her final version of it is reflected in the shift “from a narrative about a phenomenological discovery to an explicitly religious one” (Voorhees, “Writing Revelation,” 7). From her critics’ perspective, it was a failure with all its printing and typesetting errors, as well as preposterous claims to both science and Christianity. It lacks the organization and teaching authority evident in later editions. Although Eddy continued to revise and clarify her meaning for the rest of her life, she considered her first book a success. She claimed she had brought forth her discovery that ‘science’ mentally applied would heal the sick. Those familiar with the latest edition will notice some sentences and concepts almost unchanged from this first edition. An example is her early exegetical work on Genesis (with its own chapter in the final edition), which is sprinkled through a large section on ‘Creation’ in her first work.
Click here to access a pdf version of this first edition of Science and Health.
ISBN-10: 0343891808
ISBN-13 (Softcover): 978-0343891800