Of all the strange, and frantic, and incomprehensible, and uninterpretable books which the imagination of man has created, surely this one [Science and Health] is the prize example. It is written with a limitless confidence and complacency, and with a dash and stir and earnestness which often compel the effects of eloquence, even when the words do not seem to have any traceable meaning. There are plenty of people who imagine they understand the book; I know this, for I have talked with them; but in all cases they were people who also imagined that there were no such things as pain, sickness and death, and no realities in the world; nothing actually existent but Mind. It seems to me to modify the value of their testimony.
—Mark Twain, “Christian Science and the Book of Mrs. Eddy” (1899)
On February 1, 1866, a forty-five-year-old woman of few prospects slipped and fell on the icy streets of Lynn, Massachusetts, while on her way to a meeting of the Linwood Lodge of Good Templars, a social and temperance organization. In its brief account of the incident, the Lynn Reporter stated that the victim was “taken up in an insensible condition” and carried to a nearby house for the night, where a doctor found her injuries to be “internal and of a very serious nature.” The next day, she was removed to her home, “though in a very critical condition.”
Then, according to the victim, “on the third
