In a sketch, published by her concern, The Christian Science Publishing Society of Boston, and endorsed and approved by her as an authorized statement, is the following account of how Mrs. Eddy discovered Christian Science:
“The manner of the discovery has been vividly described. In company with her husband, she was returning from an errand of mercy, when she fell upon the icy curbstone, and was carried helpless to her home. The skilled physicians declared that there was absolutely no hope for her, and pronounced the verdict that she had but three days to live. Finding no hope and no help on earth, she lifted her heart to God. On the third day, calling for her Bible, she asked the family to leave the room. Her Bible opened to the healing of the palsied man, Matt. ix. 2. The truth which set him free she saw. The power which gave him strength she felt. The life divine which healed the sick of the palsy restored her, and she rose from the bed of pain healed and free.”
In her autobiography, “Retrospection and Introspection,” she says:
“It was in Massachusetts, February, 1866, and after the death of the magnetic doctor, Mr. P. P. Quimby, whom spiritualists would associate therewith, but who was in no wise connected with this event, that I discovered the science of Divine Metaphysical healing, which I afterward named Christian Science. The discovery came to pass in this way. During twenty years prior to my discovery I had been trying to trace all physical effects to a mental cause; and in the latter part of 1866 I gained the scientific certainty that all causation was Mind, and every effect a mental phenomenon.
“My immediate recovery from the effects of an injury caused by an accident, an injury that neither medicine nor surgery could reach, was the falling apple that led me to the discovery how to be well myself and how to make others so.
“Even to the homeopathic physician who attended me, and rejoiced in my recovery, I could not then explain the modus of my relief. I could only assure him that the Divine Spirit had wrought the miracle, a miracle which later I found to be in perfect Scientific accord with divine law.”
Unfortunately for her reputation for veracity and fortunately for the truth of history. Dr. Alvin M. Cushing, the physician who attended Mrs. Eddy, or Patterson, upon this particular occasion, is still living and as an honored member of the profession is now practising in Springfield, Mass. Dr. Cushing expressly, and under oath, denies that he at any time believed or said that Mrs. Patterson was in a critical condition, or that there was no hope for her, or that she had but three or any other limited number of days to live, and he, with great positiveness, says that she did not, on the third day or any other day of her illness, say, or suggest, or pretend, or in any way whatever intimate that she had miraculously recovered or been healed, or that, discovering or perceiving the truth of the power employed by Christ to heal the sick, she had, by it, been restored to health, and he further says that, on the contrary, on the third day and later days of this illness, he himself gave her medicine, and again in August of the same year called upon her four or five times and gave her medicine.
Dr. Cushing still has his record book in which he, at the time, recorded each visit, every symptom and every particular of his treatment.
It must be a peculiar type of mind that can believe Mrs. Eddy’s story of this illness and recovery, after having the disinterested version of the attending physician. There is no reason why Dr. Cushing’s version should be doubted. There is no reason whatever why Mrs. Eddy’s should be believed.
But Mrs. Eddy herself furnishes, as usual, the most conclusive evidence of the falsity of this story of her miraculous cure. Her inventive faculty has ever been more remarkable than her memory, and what she has forgotten contradicts her.
On “the third day,” according to her latest version, she “arose from the bed of pain, healed and free,” but in a letter dated February 15, 1866, two weeks after the accident and while she was still suffering from its effects, she complained that she was then “slowly failing,” and implored Mr. Julius Dresser, to whom the letter was written, to help her.
Here is her story of the incident as written at the time: