“Woman Goes Forth to Battle with Goliath: Mary Baker Eddy, Medical Science and Sentimental Invalidism”

Piepmeier, Alison. “Woman Goes Forth to Battle with Goliath: Mary Baker Eddy, Medical Science and Sentimental Invalidism.” Women’s Studies 30 (2001): 301–28.

Piepmeier observes that Mary Baker Eddy’s primary text, Science and Health, was published in a “cultural moment” (303) she calls an “ideology of invalidism” (305) that made illness fashionable, and a convenient escape from the demands of kitchen and bedroom for white middle-class women. This ideology was also convenient for male physicians who were in the process of taking over health care, long the domain of women in the home. Male doctors had a vested interest in women’s weakness, making their own treatments necessary. Eddy, by contrast, would validate the partnership and authority of the patient to bring about healing—thereby giving women more control over their bodies and treatments. In general, Piepmeier shows how Eddy’s text with its attention to the healing of illness, strategically rewrites the 19^th-century dominant discourses of science, invalidism, and a very male medical establishment—fields which had their “own specific concerns and language which Science and Health skillfully employs and dismantles” (308). Ultimately Eddy’s message of the immateriality of the body, and body transcendence, emphasized not only vitality and health for women, but undercut the biological differences between the sexes—the basis for economic and political power in the 19^th century.

ISSN: 1547-7045
Print ISSN: 0049-7878

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2001.9979380

See also annotation: 

“Out in Public: Configurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America” by Alison Piepmeier