Again: “Jail term for Christian Scientist Brine, who let his six-year-old child die without medical attendance.”
Again: “No medicine for dying boy. Public prosecutor to take up case of year-old son of Frank A. Black, who died on Saturday without medical attendance.”
Again: “Mr. and Mrs. Edwin M. Watson, Christian Scientists, convicted of voluntary manslaughter for failure to provide medical attendance for their seven-year-old child, Granville.”
Again: “Little Esther Quimby, the seven-year-old daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Quimby, Christian Scientists, allowed to die of malignant diphtheria without attendance
of a doctor.”
There was in this country in the neighborhood of 5,000 advertising Christian Science healers, so called, and their patients are largely women and children. If each of them has but one patient a day, there are over a million and a half lives annually placed under their senseless and impotent ministrations. As they doubtless average many more than one a day, their patients are in the aggregate many millions a year, largely women, still more largely children. There are no statistics showing the mortality of such patients, for it is the practice of these healers to conceal their operations by calling in a physician at the last moment to qualify him to give the necessary death certificate, in order that there may be no investigation of their criminal practices. It cannot be doubted, however, that the sacrifice of child life to this stupid and cruel monster runs up into the hundreds, if not the thousands, annually. Could anything be more hideous?
But what, may I ask, does Mary Baker G. Eddy care about the sacrifice of children, so only that her bank account continue to grow and grow and grow?
Her concern for children generally may be somewhat judged by her regard for the only child she ever brought into the world. Mrs. Eddy, when she was Mrs. Glover, in September, 1844, gave birth to her only child, a son, whom she named after his father, George Washington Glover. As a young infant, George lived at his aunt’s house with his mother, who, however, frequently sent him on long visits to the family of John Varney, the hired man (in whose lap it was her custom, when a young widow, to be rocked to sleep at night), and also to Mahala Sanborn, who had attended her at the boy’s birth.
When he was seven years old, Miss Sanborn, who had become Mrs. Cheeney, took him, at his mother’s request, permanently to live with her in North Groton, New Hampshire, where he was from 1851 to 1857, when the Cheeneys moved to Enterprise, Minnesota, taking George with them. During the larger part of his life in North Groton, Mrs. Eddy lived in the same town, but she seldom saw him, and did nothing for him. She abandoned him, in other words, to an entirely illiterate person who had lived as a servant in her father’s family. As her father said, she acted “just like an old ewe sheep that would not own its lamb.”
Mrs. Eddy now pretends that she was obliged to give up her child because her second husband, Patterson, would not have him in the house. This seems to me a poor reason for a woman to abandon her infant child, but it is not true in Mrs. Eddy’s case, because she did not acquire Mr. Patterson until years after she had permanently abandoned her child. So complete was her neglect, so utter her abandonment of him that at the age of sixty-five this man, born of New England parents, can neither read nor write! A mother who is so unmotherly as Mrs. Eddy was toward her only child when it was little more than a baby, cannot be expected to give herself great concern over the sacrifice of the children of strangers that is incidental to the accumulation of her fortune.