Thom Nickels: Where medicine and spirituality meet

Mark Twain was half in love with her and called her “the most interesting woman that ever lived, and the most exciting.”

Who was she? She was Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), a healer, public speaker, businesswoman and author whom the Atlantic Monthly called one of the “100 Most Influential Americans of all times.” 

Twain, an incorrigible skeptic, praised Eddy’s Christian Science as “a religion which has no hell, a religion whose heaven is not put off to another time with a break in the gulf between but begins here and now.” 

Others disagree.

Picture a relatively new American religious sect founded by a charismatic, paranoid, authoritarian leader. The church has a set of secret doctrines, and it threatens legal action against those who would reveal them. It vigorously pressures journalists, publishers and booksellers who attempt to disseminate anything but the officially sanctioned accounts of its deceased founder or its current autocratic leadership.

The history of First Church of Christ, Scientist in Philadelphia dates back to the early years of the 20th century. After its preliminary years of organizing, it held its first services in 1910 in a new edifice at 4012 Walnut Street. 

It wasn’t long before the Church saw a booming membership and plans were made to establish branches in other sections of Philadelphia. In October 1919 there was a schism of sorts when twenty-six members left the First Church and formed the Fifth Church in Center City. The Fifth Church saw some success and in 1930 purchased Christ Church (Episcopal) Chapel at 1915 Pine Street. 

“Physician, heal thyself” is the quote that occurs to me whenever I pass a Christian Science church. Whenever I think of Christian Science, I remember my years as an operating room technician. That’s when I witnessed my share of unnecessary and excessive surgical procedures: patients hacked to steak tartare, then stitched up just so they could have a few more moments of life; life support measures and corrective remedies that caused more pain than the diseases they sought to eliminate. I’ve witnessed the horrors of exploratory surgery before the days of MRI and cat scans, of watching surgeons cut open patients from the chest to the lower abdominal region. 

I’ve witnessed the fallibility of doctors as they experimented on patients too numb and shell shocked to protest. I’ve held frightened strong men and women as they were given spinal anesthesia blocks where the anesthetist repeatedly missed the mark and had to be repeated many times over. Spinal blocks were painful and often patients screamed in agony, moving their bodies uncontrollably. I held hundreds of patients during my two and a half year sojourn in the operating room; if I close my eyes I can still see some of the faces of these patients. The nurses thought I had a knack for calming people so I was in demand as “a holder.” 

Surgeons were the supreme divas and CEOs of the operating room. They ruled with iron forceps. They were the infallible emperors. God help the scrub nurse — they were all women in those days — who made a mistake during the course of an operation, the most common being the passing of a wrong instrument. The offending nurse was dressed down in the manner of a lowly peasant. Many were expelled from the surgeon’s room in tears. The “refugee” scrub nurse was then assigned to another operating room. Orderlies and technicians were considered too far down the totem pole to be worth yelling at by the surgeons although some scrub nurses worked off the effects of being abused by abusing the orderlies. 

Other surgeons acted out by throwing instruments across the room. These experiences were quite common. The tantrums could be long or short, depending on the “offense,” but the idea — indeed, part of the job description of the scrub nurse — was to prevent these outbursts from happening in the first place. The surgeons were considered above reproach; they were coddled in every way, and rudeness and arrogance from them was accepted as a by-product of operating room life. 

This produced a paranoid walking on eggshells atmosphere in the OR.  

Martin Gardner’s 1993 classic book, “The Healing Revelations of Mary Baker Eddy,” is anything but an objective account of this spiritualist and medium’s life. In fact, the book mounts a heady attack early on without allowing readers to come to their own conclusions regarding Eddy.

Page by page, chapter by chapter, Gardner tells us that this teaching or this belief is absurd or sick. Like a mud bath that keeps getting dirtier, there’s hardly a neutral space in the prose where one can get into the psyche of Mary Baker Eddy without a label or criticism being repeated over and over. 

The author tells us that Eddy adopted the healing techniques of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802-1866), a former clockmaker turned mind healer and clairvoyant who had some success in healing individuals through hypnotism. “Almost every bodily ill is the result of wrong thinking,” Quimby wrote.

Eddy hooked onto Quimby’s belief that human beings are not Matter because Matter is an illusion. Since spirit lives forever, illness and death have no effect on humans; it is our belief in their power to overcome us that ages us and that gives disease its power and ultimate victory. 

If we believe we will grow old and die, we will grow old and die. If we refused to let this belief influence us (it always must because we’re in the physical body and so therefore subject to its foibles), we might never age.

Gardner writes about Eddy’s fascination with a mountain woman in Eastern Europe who lost track of her age and so never celebrated birthdays. Doctors determined she was 75 but she looked about 26. The woman’s belief system, Eddy tells us, never had a chance to tell her she was getting old, so the aging process was stalled. (It should be noted that in old age, Eddy saw physicians, wore spectacles, and even got false teeth.)

Dying is another matter. If we are really spirit, and matter is a total illusion, then our bodies are temporary transport vehicles and nothing about us dies when we pass over. Gardner insists, however, that Eddy believed she would live forever in the physical body.

When this was obviously not happening, Eddy, the author says, chalked this up to her beliefs not being strong enough, as well as to something called Malicious Animal Magnetism — negative thoughts and vibrations projected onto her from other people, namely enemies.

Didn’t French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre say that hell is other people? 

According to Gardner, Eddy was a religious tyrant, excommunicating people she was jealous of or felt threatened by. She would not allow church members to read any metaphysical or spiritual books but the Bible and her Science and Health. And when she enshrined herself in the regal “Mother Room” in the big church in Boston, Mark Twain, who once claimed to love her, attacked her taste for opulence. 

The criticism affected Eddy so much that she later dismantled the room.

Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.