Annotations Related to Animal Magnetism

Voorhees offers new scholarship on a broad array of topics related to Christian Science identity focusing on reception history. With attention to fully resourced details and modern scholarship, Voorhees outlines the reception history of Christian Science in fields of religion, women studies, American history, politics, medicine, and metaphysics. She probes Mary Baker Eddy’s relationships with contemporary scholars, religion leaders, and students.

McNeil’s extensive research of all the original papers of Phineas P. Quimby in conjunction with the vast holdings of The Mary Baker Eddy Library has brought resolution to the complex questions about the alleged influence mental healer Quimby had on Eddy’s later founding of Christian Science. McNeil also covers other important 19th-century figures as well as other relevant subjects, such as Mark Twain and Christian Science and early animal magnetism in 1830s and 1840s America.

The structure of this dissertation is a critical theological conversation between Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health and the 2nd-century Christian text, the Secret Revelation of John. It uses methodology from Practical Theology to highlight epistemological contrasts and similarities between the two texts and between their worldviews and orthodox worldviews. A common theological foundation lies beneath healing practices for both texts.

Dean, a graduate student in American Religious History, examines the life of Mary Baker Eddy through a psychological lens—”her desires, her fears, the way in which she came to this [Christian Science] doctrine, and her state of mind throughout her life” (61). His aim is to humanize Eddy beyond the stereotypical views of her as either saint or fraud.

Kramer’s well-researched critique on Christian Science makes her arguments easier to understand than most critics. She grasps the fundamental teachings and history of the religion well, but she left it for doctrinal reasons. Most of Perfect Peril describes her emotional and intellectual struggles with doctrinal issues. Following a crisis of faith, she concluded that Christian Science is a dangerous mind control. 

Janik traces the historical path of mesmerism from Franz Mesmer’s late 18th-century theories on animal magnetism, leading to de Puysegur’s discovery of hypnosis, to Charles Poyan’s 1830 lecture tour introducing mesmerism and hypnotism to New England, to Phineas Quimby’s mind cure practice, to Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science movement, to New Thought and eventually today’s clinical psychology.

This biography highlights Mary Baker Eddy as a Christian healer and offers the first comprehensive record of her own healing works. It demonstrates how essential her own practice of Christian healing was to her. Part 1 covers Eddy’s life story with examples of her healing works and editorial comments. Part 2 includes additional healing accounts quoted directly from original sources.

Sweet’s firsthand account of the lives and work of Bruce and his son John Klingbeil describes their organization, Spindrift, and their deep involvement with Christian Science. Spindrift’s scientific experiments with prayer for plants, attempted to prove that prayer works, but their struggles with public rejection and excommunication from the Church until their double suicide in 1993 plagued them until the end.

Gottschalk, an intellectual historian, left his post at the Christian Science Committee on Publication in 1990, uncomfortable with the leadership of the Church. Still considered a leading Christian Science scholar despite his criticism, he conducted extensive archival research for this book. Gottshcalk focuses on the last two decades of Eddy’s life and her effort to protect and perpetuate her religious teaching.

Swensen documents the long-term effect of Alfred Farlow’s early crusade to protect the growing Christian Science Church from outside attacks, and muzzle an unrestrained and over-zealous faithful. He sees this protective stance as casting a long shadow over the content of future church periodicals, and the reason why members have since shown a deep reticence for personal outreach.

​​According to Simmons, Eddy’s eschatology is understood in its original sense of an unveiling—sometimes conflicting unveiling: an earth-shattering disintegration of the ego. Both ‘catastrophic apocalypticism’ and ‘progressive apocalypticism’ (the journey of progressive unfoldment) can bring about authentic transformation, and revelation of all good, harmonious spiritual reality, or ‘ethical eschatology.’ Simmons seeks a balance on the journey from apocalyptic to paradise.

Simmons explores the reasons for the parting of ways between Mary Baker Eddy and one of her followers, Emma Curtis Hopkins. He speculates that the Hopkins-Eddy relationship embodied the second and third stages in the process of spiritual transformation where Hopkins moved through Christian Science and “graduated” to a higher spiritual level.

This well-researched biography of Emma Curtis Hopkins, little-known founder of the 19th-century New Thought movement, includes Hopkins’s early-stage affiliation with Mary Baker Eddy—her tutelage by Eddy and editorship of The Christian Science Journal for 13 months before being suddenly discharged. Harley draws on a range of scholarship to contextualize the complexity of this knotty developmental stage of Christian Science.

Taves’s work is a study of religious experience with a focus on the difference between the indwelling Spirit of God and a lively imagination. Although Mary Baker Eddy was a patient and student of Phineas Quimby’s, Taves identifies the crucial distinction between them through Eddy’s differentiation of spirit from matter. Quimby valued both states simultaneously whereas Eddy held them in complete opposition.

Historian Benowitz’s encyclopedia profile of Mary Baker Eddy is a chronology of her life: her childhood and early marriage and widowhood; her desperate attempts to find healing; her early struggles to establish herself; the publication of her textbook, Science and Health, in 1875; the tumultuous beginnings of her Church characterized by lawsuits and disenchanted students; establishing The Christian Science Monitor.

Gill, a feminist historian and biographer, offers a fresh view of Mary Baker Eddy’s achievements in the light of obstacles faced by women in her time. Without access to Church archives Gill relied on Peel’s archival research. Gill’s unique contribution challenges the traditional biographers’ view of Eddy as a hysterical invalid who abandoned her son and stole her ideas.

This book’s study on the history of Christian theology in America includes Mary Baker Eddy’s contributions. Eddy’s theological treatise, Science and Health, distanced itself from literal interpretations of the Bible, interpreting central Christian elements in terms of mental experience. Porterfield finds Eddy’s theology coherent and more fairly understood as a remarkably creative if unschooled form of American Protestant thought. 

This book is primarily a collection of Gilman’s reminiscences as he illustrated Mary Baker Eddy’s poem, Christ and Christmas. Gilman’s detailed letters and reminiscences of their work reveal Gilman’s profound struggle to obey and please his teacher through his art. Eddy ultimately considered the book one of her most important, as the time, prayer, and thought committed to it testifies.

Christian Science and New Thought both conveyed a “metaphysical perfectionism” in sync with late 19th-century American can-do spirit and the golden glow of California culture with its promises of prosperity. Key women in Christian Science left the movement to become teachers and prime movers of New Thought in California. Other reasons for the decline in both movements today are discussed. 

Moore, a historian, places Mary Baker Eddy in her 19th-century social and religious context to examine why her movement was considered by many as ‘occult,’ and yet why so many sensible Americans flocked to Christian Science. “Christian Science (and the other outlier religious groups) grew as a perfectly ordinary manifestation of tensions that were always present in American society.”

Franz Mesmer believed that through the use of magnets he could manipulate an invisible energy or fluid that he called ‘animal magnetism,’ which existed in all beings, to cure patients. The focus of mesmerism was the balancing of this energy. Several 19th-century American thought leaders, including Mary Baker Eddy, acknowledged the influence of mesmerism in their teaching methodologies.

Smith and Wilson, the authors of the ‘Paul Revere’ publications, circulated their materials in the second quarter of the 20th century. Contrary to harsh opposition from those not of the faith who sought to destroy the Church, Paul Revere’s strong critique sought to save the Church from its own undoing. Smith and Wilson were dropped from Church membership in 1950.

Houpt’s book contains valuable primary sources for the history of Christian Science in the decades before and after Mary Baker Eddy’s death in 1910. It covers the life and career of Bliss Knapp, who devoted his life to serving Eddy and her cause. He is best known as the leading proponent of Eddy’s prophetic role as the woman in the Apocalypse.

Volume two of Peel’s trilogy covers Mary Baker Eddy’s expanding years of 1877 to 1891, her crucial period of trial and error as she fights for the survival of her nascent movement. She organizes her church, clarifies her revolutionary interpretation of the Bible, and teaches pupils who will carry the message of Christian Science beyond New England to a wider world.

“Discovery” is the first in a three-volume biography of Mary Baker Eddy by Peel, a literary critic, counter-intelligence officer, and editorial consultant to the Christian Science Church. Striving for a straightforward account, without apologetics or polemics, Peel examines Eddy’s intellectual and spiritual path of discovery, from her life of obscurity and loss to her search for health and spiritual breakthrough.