Resources Discussing George Hegel

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.

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.

Johnsen’s 1980 overview of the multi-decade controversy over a forgery is a response to the enduring nature of the false accusations against Mary Baker Eddy as a plagiarist. Research leading to the discovery of forgery was not difficult, because handwriting experts quickly detected the astonishingly crude and obvious fraud that served as a basis for the accusations.

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.

Nineteen years after the publication of Haushalter’s charges of Mary Baker Eddy’s plagiarism, Dr. Moehlman, a member of First Baptist Church of Rochester, NY, published this scholarly rebuttal to those charges. Moehlman, a professor of the history of Christianity, specialized in the study of literary forgeries and demonstrated how Haushalter’s employment of concordance cannot be substituted for scientific analysis of content.

Before Conrad Moehlman’s scholarly 1955 rebuttal of Haushalter’s accusations of plagiarism against Eddy was published, Haushalter’s 1936 book had garnered a great deal of publicity. His charge that Eddy lifted Hegelian theology and established her chief doctrinal points in Science and Health from Hegel stems from a complicated (undocumented) tale of secret passage through one of Eddy’s early students.