Pickering, a professor of medicine for 30 years, looks at six eminent Victorians to explore the premise that their physical and psychological suffering helped generate their most productive and creative work. Relying on maily hostile sources, he reduces Eddy’s maladies to a diagnosis of hysteria and portrays Eddy as ruthless, selfish, and dishonest in never giving full credit for Christian Science to Phineas P. Quimby.
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