Annotations Related to Obstetrics

The Mary Baker Eddy Library examines Eddy’s correspondence and documents related to the 1881 chartering, development and fruition of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College. The College, an institution meant to teach Eddy’s metaphysical healing method, accepted both sexes regardless of age or gender. Eddy intended her students to practice what they learned back in their own communities.

The objective of Armer’s study of Mary Baker Eddy’s establishment of her Massachusetts Metaphysical College is to highlight the achievements of women pioneers in higher education and entrepreneurial successes. Characteristics of Eddy’s business success included taking risk, managerial skills, knowledge of the product and the market, financial resources to produce capital, and enough success to produce profits.

Four women— Emma and Abigail Dyer (daughter of Emma) Thompson, Janette Weller, and Annie M. Knott—were selected as representative of the pioneering work of early Christian Scientists due not to their gender, but to the available historical evidence, the range of their contributions to the history of Christian Science, and the relative familiarity of that person among today’s Christian Scientists.

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.

Corbett examines the ways that Eddy exercised effective leadership in increasingly male-dominated fields from which women were excluded: education, health care, and religion. She is particularly interested in the way Eddy incorporated obstetrics into her system of healing. Corbett also responds to claims that Eddy expressed an ambiguous feminism by championing women’s authority yet promoting male authority within her Church.

Schoepflin’s book contains a detailed analysis of the late 19th-century legislative and legal confrontations between Christian Scientists and the medical community, demonstrating the shifting relationship between medical practitioners, Christian Science practitioners, and the public. From medical licensing, the meaning of medical practice, and the rights of Americans to therapeutic choice, the public debate turned to matters of contagious disease, public safety and children’s rights.

Schoepflin’s study addresses the difficult and contentious relationship between the evolution of medical practice and the healing practices in Christian Science. His analysis is based on the thoughts and work of actual Christian Science practitioners and the experiences of their patients during a period (1890s–1920s) when the movement struggled against the efforts of organized American medicine to curtail its activities.

This 1930 biography on Mary Baker Eddy appears in this contemporary bibliography because of its role in Christian Science history. Without access to church archives and drawing on others who discredited her, Dakin’s biography reads like a conspiracy theory against Eddy. An important comparison can be made between Dakin’s and Lyman Powell’s biographies of the same year. 

This flagship for Christian Science by Mary Baker Eddy is used as the denominational textbook and was intended by its author to “bear consolation to the sorrowing and healing to the sick” (xii). The book’s theological premise—that Christ Jesus taught and demonstrated the spiritual facts of being—precedes the metaphysical interpretation of scripture that grounds its healing system.