The Committee on Publication and Correcting the News

Mary Baker Eddy created the CoP in 1898 “to correct in a Christian manner impositions on the public in regard to Christian Science, injustices done Mrs. Eddy or members of this Church by the daily press, by periodicals or circulated literature of any sort.”Footnote ¹² In doing so, Eddy, at the age of seventy-seven, laid the groundwork for the most institutionalized response yet mounted by any American religion for monitoring and negotiating public perception, including charges of insanity. By 1908, CoP offices were established in nearly every state in the country; eight Canadian provinces; and internationally in such countries as Mexico, France, Sweden, and Australia.Footnote ¹³ Each regional or state office was overseen by a central office in Boston. Eddy's decision to found a church branch to deal exclusively with the press was likely due to her recognition of the increasing power of newspapers to mold public sentiments relating to religion. She expressed as much in 1899 when she wrote, “the Press impresses more mortal minds than we really estimate.”Footnote ¹⁴ Indeed, the influence, circulation and readership of newspapers had never been stronger.Footnote ¹⁵ In all probability, Eddy, having long been the subject of numerous derisive newspaper profiles and scandals, was additionally motivated to create the CoP as a means of actively addressing her discontent with journalism's continued reliance on sensationalism and intrigue.Footnote ¹⁶ Within a year of the founding of the CoP, Mary Baker Eddy founded the Christian Science Publishing Society “for the purpose of more effectually promoting and extending the religion of Christian Science as taught by me,” which oversaw the publication of the Christian Science Weekly and the Christian Science Journal. Footnote ¹⁷ Owing to this, Christian Science was not simply monitoring and responding to the press as an outsider minority religious group, but was actively shaping it as an organization that had “a special stake in the free press” as a publisher of two nationally circulated periodicals and, later, with the establishment of the Christian Science Monitor, an internationally distributed newspaper. As Lee Johnson Zeunert, a former member of the CoP during the mid-twentieth century, observed, Christian Scientists relied on freedom of religion to practice their faith and keenly understood that “freedom of religion and the press very likely stand or fall together.”Footnote ¹⁸

The primary means employed by the CoP to affect public opinion and dislodge negative portrayals of Christian Science was to pen letters to newspaper editors. Compilations of such responses authored by state CoPs were published as pamphlets with titles such as “Christian Science: Historical Facts.” These corrective devices were distributed to libraries around the country along with copies of the religion's textbook Science and Health to influence the American public's understanding of Christian Science as a legitimate form of both Christian practice and healing.Footnote ¹⁹ In January of 1900, the original three-person CoP was dissolved and control was consolidated under Alfred Farlow, one of Eddy's most trusted associates. With Farlow's guidance and Eddy's direction, the Committee aimed to respond to inaccurate portrayals of Christian Science with tact. While there was not yet a single handbook directing members of the CoP, they received regular guidance by Farlow. He advised them to be careful not to make any personal attacks against those who spread mistruths about Christian Science, or, as he put it, to “eliminate every sting from our articles and replies, using extreme care not to have anything in the nature of attack upon persons or classes.”Footnote ²⁰ Additionally, he advocated Committee representatives meet in person with local newspaper editors to encourage friendly relationships with them. These personal rendezvous were not always well-received, however, as was the case when Farlow was treated like “a dog” by the staff of a Boston newspaper.Footnote ²¹ Despite this occasional hostility, Farlow directed Committee representatives to remain kind and, in Christian Science fashion, resolve the issue by directing their prayers toward the authors of any inaccuracies. Exposés of competing theologies or medical systems were to be avoided. In certain cases, Farlow weighed the possibility of attracting more attention to negative or inaccurate coverage and determined that it was prudent not to respond at all.

The CoP labored to correct a variety of misrepresentations in the press, especially public portrayals of Christian Science regarding its effectiveness at healing and safety, but the preponderance of articles associating Christian Science with insanity demanded the CoP to continue to direct its attention to combating insanity allegations as part of its duties. In addition to newspapers, the CoP thoroughly reviewed a diversity of publications for misrepresentations of Christian Science including religious periodicals, magazines, and medical journals. To assist tracking public accounts of their faith, the CoP subscribed to a number of press clipping bureaus, including Luce's Press Clipping Bureau, the Twentieth Century Clipping Bureau, and the American Press Clipping Bureau.Footnote ²² These subscriptions were effective tools for monitoring the rapidly growing number of newspapers at the time and allowed the CoP to efficiently track public portrayals of Christian Science. From 1900 to 1915, a period that overlaps with one of the Church's greatest periods of growth, hundreds of articles were collected by the CoP via clipping bureaus regarding Christian Science's association with insanity, some being sorted into categories of “adverse” and others “favorable” for their perceived public effect.Footnote ²³ The CoP's activities in this regard reflected their belief in the “right to reply or correction,” a democratic participatory attitude toward the press as an institution that demanded response and often rebuttal as a means of ensuring the accurate flow of information. Farlow considered the CoP's corrections as a service rendered to newspaper editors and reasoned that editors could not rightly consider their published work to be news until it was true.Footnote ²⁴ In the process of correcting representations of their faith as a cause of nervous disease, the CoP worked to steer Progressive Era newspapers away from their focus on sensationalism, and thereby protect Christian Science as a legitimate Christian church while further spreading its healing tradition.

The early years of the CoP overlapped with the nascent public relations field when several corporate entities began to enlist professional help with advertising to curry favor with American consumers. However, while many of the CoP's activities were aimed at influencing public opinion, and Eddy's designs for the Church and its government can arguably be compared with a corporate structure, the early CoP did not seek to proselytize or advertise Christian Science in lay publications and observed what Farlow referred to as “forbearance” in this regard. Rather, in the early years of its history, the CoP assumed more of a defensive or corrective position of Christian Science than a promotional one.Footnote ²⁵ “I made no effort to effect an untimely introduction of Christian Science in the newspapers or other periodicals, nor to intrude it upon the public in any way,” observed Farlow in his memoir about his twenty-six years as head of the CoP. “I held the opinion that the subject should be discussed only where it was welcome.” Instead, Farlow was confident that Christian Science would be “known by its fruits and that our neighbors would be attracted to it by reason of its good works.” At the same time, he was keenly aware that Christian Science necessitated safeguarding in the press, having “discovered that if misstatements were allowed to remain uncorrected, the tendency was to engender bitterness and crush out toleration.”Footnote ²⁶ This early idealism guided CoP activities away from proselytization and advertising and is evidenced in Farlow's advice that state CoPs avoid citing Eddy's writings and instead opt for citations from the Bible to back their claims.Footnote ²⁷ The decision to avoid Eddy's writings in CoP corrections also meant that, while Christian Scientists refuted a medical understanding of insanity, instead believing it to be “the baneful effect of illusion on mortal minds and bodies,” and fundamentally denied the existence of disease both physical and mental, Christian Science's theological perspective on madness and metaphysical beliefs about the nature of being and health were not cited by defendants of Christian Science or the CoP to argue against public insanity charges.Footnote ²⁸

In the public contest over whether their faith was a source or indicator of mental disease, the CoP labored to distance Christian Science from the insanity label as a means of establishing their public respectability as both a new religious faith and the efficacy of their divine healing practice. Although Eddy was adamant that Christian Science was not faith healing and could not rightly be compared with other healing traditions, Christian Science was nonetheless one thread among many in the larger fabric of the American Protestant embrace of spiritual healing during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote ²⁹ The successful healing of mental and physical disease through prayer proved to Christian Scientists that the divine healing practiced during the “age of miracles” had not ceased with the apostles and confirmed Jesus's promise: “He that believeth in me, the works that I do shall he do also.”Footnote ³⁰ Mary Baker Eddy was adamant that exclusive reliance on prayer was the only effective and authentic method of divine healing and reasoned that “God does not employ drugs or hygiene, or provide them for human use, else Jesus also would have recommended and employed them in his healing.”Footnote ³¹ In Science and Health, the religion's textbook and later its literal pastor, Eddy emphasized the metaphysical predicate of all existence as one entirely bereft of sin, disease, and death. In this understanding, the only true reality and source of being was God, who was alternately referred to by the seven synonyms Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, and Love. In her “Scientific Statement of Being,” Eddy repudiated the power and reality of matter and disease, positing instead that the true nature of man was Divine Spirit:

Physical, mental, and spiritual health, or the promise of it, was central to Christian Science as a divine healing tradition. Experiences of disease or ill health were cast off as illusory products of “mortal mind,” or the tendency to understand the material as an author of creation rather than Divine Spirit or God. “It is the human belief, and not the divine arbitrament,” declared Eddy in Science and Health, “which brings the physical organism under the yoke of disease.”Footnote ³³ Through her many publications and instruction, Eddy aimed to recenter Jesus's healing ministry and called followers to live Jesus's example not only morally but practically by demonstrating the “divine science” of his healing tradition, that is, healing themselves and others through prayer alone. “It is the duty and privilege of every child, man, and woman,” she wrote, “to follow in some degree the example of the Master by the demonstration of Truth and Life, of health and holiness.”Footnote ³⁴ The significance of healing and health within Christian Science meant that accusations of the religion as precipitous of disease struck at the very core of its theology and practice. Insanity allegations were not simply “bad press” for the Church of Christ, Scientist. Rather, charges that the religion fostered or indicated insanity undermined two core dimensions of the religion. First, the association of mental disease with Christian Science subverted the Christian Science belief that complete healing and health was possible through divine science and undermined Scientists’ efforts to revivify Christianity through divine healing. Second, the claims effectively weakened the reputation of Christian Science practitioners, the majority of whom were women, who advertised their healing services to individuals seeking relief from illness. Insanity communicated notions of irrationality, instability, and disease—all associations the Church of Christ, Scientist wished to distance itself from as a new religious tradition predicated on the power of divine healing to rectify all manner of mental and physical disorders. CoP offices around the country therefore investigated cases of insanity attributed to Christian Science in an effort to correct what Falow referred to as “misapprehensions” of the religion.Footnote ³⁵

The Brush Will Case's Examination of the Line between Religion and Insanity

In 1901, the CoP closely monitored newspaper reporting on what became known as the Brush Will Case.Footnote ³⁶ Helen C. Brush, a recent convert to Christian Science before her death, had left the majority of her large estate to the First Church of Christ, Scientist in Manhattan before dying of consumption. Her disgruntled siblings—who received a much smaller portion of the estate compared with the Church's—contested the legitimacy of the will, arguing that their sister was not mentally competent to execute a will owing to her identity as a Christian Scientist.Footnote ³⁷ Throughout the trial proceedings, expert medical witnesses were called by both sides to adjudge the sanity of a deceased woman whom they had never met, and to evaluate a religion that was not their own and of which they admitted to know very little.Footnote ³⁸ Instead, Helen Brush's purported insanity was assessed based on a long series of hypothetical beliefs that were asserted to be consistent with Christian Science practice, namely forgoing medical attention in favor of Christian Science healing by prayer. Brush's supposed belief that all the blood could be drained from her body and she could still live owing to Christian Science treatment was presented as proof of her insanity, although whether Brush in fact espoused such a view during her life remained unsupported.Footnote ³⁹ The prominent physician and alienist Dr. Allan McLane Hamilton, grandson of Alexander Hamilton, served as an expert witness. A fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine and founder of the New York Psychiatric Society, Hamilton was well known as one of the leading authorities on mental and nervous diseases and had served previously as an expert medical witness in 1881 during the trial of Charles J. Guiteau, the assassin of President Garfield. Court transcripts of the Brush Will Case reveal that Hamilton consistently avoided offering any absolute statement about Christian Science or religion as it related to insanity despite efforts by the prosecutor and the press to represent his views otherwise. He repeatedly attempted to convey to the court that defining and assessing insanity, especially in relation to religion, was a complex diagnostic procedure that evaded simple description. While the prosecution sought a tidy and concise view on whether or not Helen Brush was insane owing to her belief in Christian Science, Hamilton provided only contingent responses such as, “[A] delusion of any faith may be an insane delusion under certain circumstances, or a sane one.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Hamilton's hedging of the issue was not intentionally cryptic. Rather, his refusal to offer any unqualified statement on the relationship between Christian Science and insanity, or whether or not “belief in the New Testament was an insane delusion,” was a product of the muddied state of discerning insanity more broadly at the time.Footnote ⁴¹ As physician E. Stanley Abbot noted not long after the trial, the first problem of psychiatry “is not what causes insanity, but what is insanity.” He added that, “on turning to the writers on insanity, we find almost as many different definitions as there are writers who try to define it, while many do not even attempt any definition at all.”Footnote ⁴² Despite Hamilton's general evasiveness, he eventually leaned toward a stance regarding the relationship between Christian Science belief and madness and stated that believing “the Divine Mind can cure diseases through human agency without material aid” was “to an extent insane.” He further agreed with the prosecutor's line of reasoning that, while it may have been reasonable two thousand or even one hundred years ago to believe in divine healing, by 1901 if anyone believed as much he would “question his mental soundness.”Footnote ⁴³ This fundamental Christian Science belief for Hamilton was “most decidedly” a delusion. However, when pressed further to confirm he was referring to an insane delusion, Hamilton replied, “with other symptoms, yes. It may be a sane or an insane delusion.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Hamilton's careful and measured approach to adjudging insanity, his essential distinction between sane delusion and insane delusion, as well as his qualifying statements about insanity and its relationship with religion, were largely ignored by the press who were more interested in selling newspapers through continued exposés of the “cult” of Christian Science than offering nuanced accounts of legal testimonies.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Philadelphia daily The North American reported on Hamilton's testimony on February 19, 1901, with the headline “Christian Science is Insanity, Says Expert.” They reported simply that Dr. Hamilton “says all Christian Scientists are insane.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The New York Times proclaimed “Christian Science an Insane Delusion.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Similarly, in an article titled “Faith Curists Suffer from Delusion!,” the New York Journal reported that Hamilton had declared “all sincere believers in Christian Science suffered from mental delusion” and that “he [Hamilton] would not budge from his position that Miss Brush acted under an insane delusion, caused by the Christian Science teaching, when she made her will.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Other articles, with headlines such as “Christian Science Is Just Plain Lunacy” and “Christian Science an Insane Delusion,” referenced Hamilton's testimony as being decidedly supportive of the view that Helen Brush had suffered from a mental delusion during her life and was insane.Footnote ⁴⁹ Underscoring the integrity of such headlines were references to Hamilton's prestige as “an eminent and honorable physician.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Even the countertestimony offered by the defense's expert medical witness, alienist Dr. Austin Flint, who refused to evaluate Brush's insanity on the basis of her religion, nonetheless prompted headlines with the contention that the new religion was a form of madness or, at the very least, a disputed form.Footnote ⁵¹ The Brush Will Case brought the beliefs, doctrines, practices, and diverse identities of Christian Science into the public record, all predicated on the leading question of whether or not Brush's belief in Christian Science healing indicated insanity. As many Scientists and non-Scientists alike concluded, “[T]he teachings of Christian Science were the feature, in fact the basis” of the trial.Footnote ⁵² By effect, one of the earliest and largest expositions of Christian Science belief and practices introduced to the American public was inextricably bound up with the charge of insanity.Footnote ⁵³

The proceedings of the Brush Will Case were not only of interest to the CoP and the hundreds of Christian Scientists who filled the courtroom each day. While the trial was predicated on the legality of one woman's will, the questions probed in the suit brought to the public mind several unresolved issues regarding religion's place in society, especially its relationship with medicine and healing. A Kentucky newspaper deemed the case to be “one of the most interesting that has engaged the attention of lawyers and the public in general for many a year.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The case additionally evoked questions concerning the effectiveness of medical jurisprudence in assessing the line between faith and disease. For instance, an editorial sympathetic to Christian Science published in the New York Sun commented that, while it was “a very convenient way to dispose of religious belief by describing and treating those who have it as pestilent victims of lunacy,” in fact “such a method conflicted with the nation's commitment to liberty of religious opinion.”Footnote ⁵⁵ A Harper's Weekly writer similarly evoked the nation's constitutional commitment to religious freedom, writing, “If we begin to count men insane because of their religious beliefs, who is there who will be held competent to dispose of his property by will, if his judge entertain an opposite religious belief?”Footnote ⁵⁶

Ultimately, the judge upheld Helen Brush's will, concluding “the truth or falsity of a religious belief is beyond the scope of a judicial inquiry.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The New York Times lamented the court's decision as one that “disappoints all right-thinking people and fills with joy both the deluded and the deluding members of the most pestilent sect.”Footnote ⁵⁸ While others viewed the case as affording Christian Science a “legal stamp” of legitimacy, granting “its many extraordinary contentions to the dignity of beliefs,” many Scientists were still bitter about the trial's proceedings.Footnote ⁵⁹ The judge's decision had absolved Christian Science to a degree, but his ruling could not erase nearly a year's negative coverage in the press, which had suggested to readers that Christian Science both caused and evidenced mental disease. The trial's scrutiny of divine healing as a form of madness prompted an editor for The Christian Science Journal to write, “A God unable to heal and save to the uttermost all who go to Him in the true and understanding way, were no God. A Bible which taught not the healing and saving power of the God it portrays, were no Bible.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Mary Baker Eddy similarly came to the defense of Christian Science healing following the trial by penning an article for the New York Sunday Journal titled “Christian Science Healing Explained and Defended,” in which she stated, “To say that it is a sin to ride to church on an electric car would not be more preposterous than to believe that man's Maker is not equal to the destruction of disease germs.”Footnote ⁶¹ Eddy did not directly address the insanity claims against Christian Science, likely because she refuted the medical interpretation of insanity as part of her larger denial of the material foundation of illness and disease.

Religion, Madness, and Health

Headlines during the Brush Will Case that intimated a causal connection between religion and insanity built on nearly a century of insane asylum superintendent reports, federal census data, almanacs, medical etiologies of insanity, and popular reporting regarding religion as a cause of madness.Footnote ⁶² Early psychiatric understandings of insanity and mental disease were developed within the institutional framework of asylum medicine. During the early and mid-nineteenth century, religious insanity, a nebulous disease label alternately referred to as religious anxiety, religious excitement, and religious melancholy, or by the name of the religion considered the cause, topped the moral or nonphysical causes of insanity for asylum admissions in the United States.Footnote ⁶³ While the definition of insanity remained a subject of perennial debate among early psychiatrists, it was generally viewed as somatic in origin and religion was considered a precipitating rather than a direct cause. Evangelical revivalism, Adventism, and Spiritualism, among other religions, were identified as causes of insanity in this vein. By the end of the century, religion was no longer considered a “potent factor” in precipitating insanity and ceased to be included among causes of asylum admissions and within medical classifications of insanity.Footnote ⁶⁴ A gradual shift in the categorization of mental disease occurred during this period with the introduction of German physician Emil Kraeplin's new classification scheme of insanities and their definitions according to age of onset, course, and outcome. Forms of insanity attributed to religious causes that had been previously interpreted as variants of melancholia, mania, and dementia were subsumed under new and broader psychiatric disease categories within the Kraepelian system, particularly dementia praecox, an incurable form of psychosis.Footnote ⁶⁵ However, even as religion disappeared from psychiatric classifications of insanity at the turn of the century, religion, especially new religions, remained entwined in the popular imagination as a cause of insanity as evidenced by cases such as the Brush Will trial and the continued popular reporting of Christian Science as a source of insanity. However, it is important to note that popular representations of insanity, such as those portraying Christian Science as a cause or indicator of insanity, did not necessarily reflect professional psychiatric understandings of nervous disease, a point that some experts on mental disease such as Hamilton openly begrudged.Footnote ⁶⁶

Associating religious movements with insanity, as Heather D. Curtis has explained, was “a longstanding strategy for regulating religious experience.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Contemporaneous to allegations against Christian Scientists were those targeted at Jehovah's Witnesses, Second Adventists, and Pentecostals. Consequently, the currency of insanity charges against members of new religions had been well established by the time the Brush Will Case was reported across the country and the press’ continued tactic of reinforcing the public sense that Christian Science was a form of religious insanity built on the long use of this charge. However, whereas religious insanity and charges of madness had long been bound up in medical and theological debates over “ecstatic” or “emotional” variants of religious behavior such as shaking, crying, exhibiting trance-like states, or, in the case of Pentecostalism, speaking in tongues, charges of insanity against Christian Scientists did not fit this trend. Mary Baker Eddy structured worship in the Church of Christ, Scientist so as to leave very little room for the kind of religious “enthusiasms” that earlier critics of evangelical revivalism or contemporary critics of Pentecostalism decried as precipitous of nervous disease. The Church of Christ, Scientist possessed neither the clergy nor sermons characteristic of other Protestant churches. In 1894, Eddy ordained the Bible and Science and Health as the literal pastor of The Mother Church to “continue to preach for this Church and the world.” Every Church service was structured around a predetermined “Lesson-Sermon,” or course of readings from the Bible and Science and Health, recitation of the Lord's Prayer, and hymn singing as outlined by Eddy and codified in the Church Manual.Footnote ⁶⁸ Even the testimony portion of the Wednesday service in which churchgoers shared their experiences with Christian Science healing were generally subdued affairs characterized by gratitude to God for healing and to Eddy for teaching divine science. All of these church elements were purposeful and were intended to steer focus solely to the Bible and Science and Health to prevent against human personalities and interpretations that could incite sectionalism.Footnote ⁶⁹ As a result, the kind of passion-arousing sermons or preachers thought to trigger madness within evangelical and Pentecostal groups were largely absent. Instead, the explicit object of critics’ scorn regarding Christian Science and the purported evidence of its mental deviance was the basis of Christian Science itself—the radical reliance on prayer for healing predicated on the belief in “the nothingness of matter” and disease.Footnote ⁷⁰

Popular Reporting and Christian Science as a Threat to Women's Health

Embedded within the continued popular association of Christian Science with mental disease was more than criticism of divine healing but a distinctly gendered concern with the new religion's promotion of theological study and engagement in religious healing among women. Popular portrayals of Christian Science as a cause of mental disease uniformly presumed female “victims” of Christian Science were white women.Footnote ⁷¹ Newspaper reports not only displayed a disproportionate concern with white women in general, but with young white women. In part, critics’ concern with the threat Christian Science study posed to women reflected the religion's membership and character. By 1906, over 70 percent of Christian Science members were women, making it the largest female majority in any faith tradition at the time. Moreover, the nature of Christian Science healing was “a distinctly communal and feminine process.”Footnote ⁷² Nevertheless, the disproportionate representation of women gone mad over Christian Science also echoed broader cultural resentments against women's education and participation in religion. Scholars such as Elizabeth Lunbeck, Jonathan Metzel, and Martin Summers, among others, have shown how racial and gendered presumptions are reflected in both psychiatric and popular attitudes toward insanity or mental illness.Footnote ⁷³ Cultural biases against divergent forms of religious thought or expression represent an additional component influential in shaping historical assessments of insanity.

Both fleeting and more sustained exposure to the divine healing doctrines taught by Mary Baker Eddy, and especially study of the religion's textbook Science and Health, was reported as a cause of insanity for women whose minds were deemed uniquely vulnerable to the effects of overreading and study.Footnote ⁷⁴ In 1901, for instance, “too close application to the study of the principles of Christian Science” caused one woman to escape from the Westport Sanitarium in Connecticut.Footnote ⁷⁵ A similar case was reported of a girl whose “mind became unbalanced from studying too closely the principles of Christian Science” and who thereafter escaped from a sanitarium in Marietta, Ohio.Footnote ⁷⁶ In 1905, Mrs. Anna Smith of Muncie, Indiana, was allegedly driven insane after “her ineffectual attempts to master the study of Christian Science.” R. Stanhope Easterday, head of the Indiana CoP, responded with a letter to the editor of the Muncie Evening Press. He argued that Mrs. Smith had been interested in Christian Science only two months before her “mental collapse,” and further that Mrs. Smith herself expressed regret that she did not continue her Christian Science treatments as they had been a source of comfort for her. “Christian Science has healed numberless cases of incipient and violent insanity,” Easterday asserted, “and it would be impossible for its teachings to lead to any such unfortunate condition.”Footnote ⁷⁷ In denying the possibility that Christian Science could have caused Mrs. Smith's insanity, Easterday underscored his belief in the efficacy of divine healing and repositioned Christian Science study and treatment as a salutary engagement that could hardly cause the kind of nervous unrest in women that critics claimed. Moreover, by defending the healthful effects of studying Science and Health, the Bible, and Eddy's writings, as all Christian Scientists were called to do, Easterday was effectively, although perhaps unwittingly, also pushing against a longstanding cultural bias against women's education.

The belief that white women could become unbalanced from reading Christian Science literature drew on understandings of bodily and mental health as a delicate equilibrium that could be easily disturbed through overexcitement or stimulation of the mind. Medical literature of the late nineteenth century portrayed white women's bodies, particularly middle and upper class women, as innately more sensitive, more unpredictable, and more prone to disturbance and nervous disease compared with men's bodies owing to the effects of menstruation and the vagaries of their reproductive organs. A special concern with the health of younger women who studied Christian Science reflected corollary medical views that interpreted women's health as being especially vulnerable during puberty and young adulthood, when the development of the reproductive organs demanded the full attention of her “vital and constructive force.” In the late nineteenth century, male physicians such as Edward Hammond Clarke argued that the diversion of this force to the brain during female study disrupted the proper development of the ovaries and thereby threatened the health of a woman, her fitness as a future mother and wife, the eventual health of her children, and even the race as a whole.Footnote ⁷⁸ Far from edifying the mind, women's education, according to critics like Clarke, put women at risk for a host of nervous diseases such as neurasthenia and hysteria. Thus even as more women came to occupy public professions and attend university at the turn of the century, interpretations that linked female invalidism, education, and nervous disease persisted.

Christian Science not only required women to engage in regular theological study of the religion's textbook Science and Health, the Bible, and Eddy's numerous writings, but offered paths to professionalization as Christian Science practitioners and teachers. Despite Eddy's own “ambiguous feminism,” many scholars agree that Christian Science afforded women otherwise rare opportunities for social and economic advancement.Footnote ⁷⁹ After graduating from one of Eddy's Metaphysical Colleges, female Christian Science practitioners carried the title of Doctor, held the degree of Bachelor of Christian Science, and could set up their own independent and often lucrative healing practices.Footnote ⁸⁰ Rosemary Hicks's study of Christian Science identified how the three intersecting areas of Christian Science—religion, education, and healing practices—were precisely those areas “in which conceptions of gender were constantly embattled and in flux during the nineteenth century.” Hicks has also underscored how it is important to understand that religious conviction, rather than social or economic advancement, was the primary cause of women's participation in Christian Science and that women were principally religiously motivated in “challenging the hegemony of segregated spheres ideology and re-creating new meanings of both gender and space.”Footnote ⁸¹ The woman-dominated professionalized healing tradition of Christian Science set it apart from other religious movements of the period and fostered an expanded presence in American public life for female healing authority and leadership directly observable to outsiders through the many press profiles of Mary Baker Eddy, church construction, and signs on city streets advertising women practitioners’ services. Recognition of the contested social terrain women Scientists occupied as professional healers, teachers, and students at the turn of the century draws out further implications for their regular pathologization. More than a social threat of nervous disease, Christian Science instead was indicted as a maddening influence for its promotion of women's study and professionalization as healers.

In August 1908, Miss Flora Draper, a “woman leader in [the] Scientist Church” was declared by the Detroit News to be a “victim of over-reading” and committed to the psychopathic ward of Roosevelt Hospital in New York.Footnote ⁸² While the female Christian Science practitioner or teacher represented the greater transgression of traditional understandings of “separate spheres” ideology, the primary focus of articles published on Christian Science and its causal relationship to insanity focused not on the practitioner or “woman leader” of Christian Science but her female student. The same month that Miss Flora Draper was declared a “victim” of Christian Science, the Maryland Times Cumberland reported that Lillian E. Bowdoin had been adjudged insane, her health greatly deteriorated by “overstudy” of Christian Science literature.Footnote ⁸³ Some newspaper reports, such as “Loses Her Mind over Christian Science,” published in the Cleveland News in October 1907, suggested brief study or even simply pondering Christian Science was enough to destabilize women's minds to the point of madness.Footnote ⁸⁴ In March 1906, the CoP monitored an explosion of national coverage about the mental deterioration of Kate Jarvis. A New York Press article titled “Christian Science Meeting Unhinges Woman's Mind” reported that the thirty-six-year-old had become “violently insane” while “under the influence” of Christian Scientists.Footnote ⁸⁵ Jarvis's “unhinged” mind became front-page news across the country in large part because of her class status; she was a member of a notable Staten Island family and the new bride of a wealthy hotel proprietor. Jarvis's brother reported that she talked of nothing else after converting to Christian Science. Before her new interest, she was considered a “strikingly handsome and gracious woman,” but after becoming a Scientist, Jarvis degraded into “a mental and physical wreck due to thinking too constantly of her new belief” and was reportedly discovered “mad and shrieking in her room.” Eventually Jarvis was considered so violently insane that she was restricted with a straight jacket for a thousand-mile drive from Florida to New York.Footnote ⁸⁶

It did not take long for the CoP to respond to the case. H. Cornell Wilson of the New York office pointed out in a letter to the editor of the New York American that Jarvis had been baptized in the Methodist Episcopal Church within two weeks of her mental breakdown. While it was true she had met with a Christian Scientist in Palm Beach, and was given some literature, her interest was not pronounced enough to bring her to a church service or Christian Science Reading Room where Christian Science literature was sold and available for reading. Wilson further explained that Jarvis suffered from extreme homesickness, and that this was the true cause of her “severe fits of melancholia.” He resoundingly denied the suggestion that Christian Science could have unbalanced Jarvis's mind, and wrote, “Christian Science is the religion of Christ Jesus spiritually understood and demonstrated, and while able to cure insanity, as it has done in numerous well-authenticated instances, could never cause it.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The publicity surrounding the Jarvis case was deemed so disruptive that John H. Williams of the Florida CoP advertised a free public lecture on Christian Science to further dislodge the public suggestion that Christian Science led to insanity. The lecture was delivered by Edward A. Kimball of Chicago, a Christian Science practitioner and member of the Church's International Board of Lectureship, another branch of the Christian Science Church aimed at educating the public on Christian Science and combating negative views of the Church. “Those who hear him will no doubt agree with Christian Scientists, that a knowledge of this subject could not produce insanity,” wrote Williams.Footnote ⁸⁸

During the public coverage of her purported insanity, Kate Jarvis was said to be suffering from “religious excitement” after she attended a series of meetings—alternately referred to as revivals—held by the Christian Science Church in Palm Beach. This language and framing was reminiscent of early nineteenth-century reporting on madness induced by participation in evangelical revivals and premised in understandings that linked religious engagement and women's invalidism.Footnote ⁸⁹ In 1835, Amariah Brigham, superintendent of the New York State Lunatic Asylum, warned of the specific risks to women of attending evangelical revivalist meetings. Brigham pointed out that the custom of holding revivalist meetings at night, when women should, according to him, rightfully be at home keeping quiet, provoked an “excitement of the mind” that weakened the body thereby making it more susceptible to nervous disease, a view consistent with somatic interpretations of insanity prevalent at the time. He cautioned that since revivals generally attracted more women than men, and especially young women, attendance at revivalist meetings was causing women to become invalids “unfited for labor, or for the duties of a mother.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Women's bodies continued to be used as battlegrounds over notions of true religion and insanity, morality and immorality, and health and nervous disease throughout the century. In 1874, physician Frederic Rowland Martin, a self-avowed enemy of Spiritualism, built on decades of presumptions linking female invalidism, psychopathology and religion with his creation of a new disease label specific to female mediumship, which he termed “mediomania” or the “insanity of mediums.”Footnote ⁹¹ Mediomania was classified as a distinctly feminine disorder premised on Martin's understanding that women were “naturally more sensitive, impulsive, and enthusiastic than men” in the realm of religion.Footnote ⁹²

Popular profiles of mad women Scientists compounded social fears surrounding women's religious involvement, education, and health by intimating that Christian Science study additionally posed a threat to marriage, children, and the home. In 1908, the Washington State Bellingham American published a story about Mrs. Kate Meyers, who was committed to the Fort Steilacoom Asylum after suffering from “religious dementia occasioned by excessive Christian Science study.” Consequently, she left behind four children and her husband to care for themselves.Footnote ⁹³ According to the Grand Rapids Herald, Catherine Hull of Michigan similarly became “crazed . . . by close study of the tenets of Christian Science.” Hull's husband stated she had always been “a great lover of her home” in Michigan, that is until Mrs. Eddy's doctrines “affected her mind,” causing her to leave her home and presumably the supervision of her husband.Footnote ⁹⁴ The negative generational influence of studying Christian Science was suggested in a story published in Indiana about Mrs. Woehl, who became “hopelessly insane” and at times “raving mad, frothing at the mouth, and attempting to bite those caring for her” after studying Christian Science literature. As a result, her two children turned into “nervous wrecks.”Footnote ⁹⁵ For others, like Mrs. Thomas Troy of Illinois, Christian Science doctrine similarly proved “too much for the brain.”Footnote ⁹⁶ In 1912, Mrs. Margaret A. Wright of Boston faced trial for insanity, a hearing initiated by her husband who sought to have her committed. Witnesses testified she “neglected her children and her home in order to give her attention to Christian Science.” When asked during the trial if Christian Science taught her that she “should stay home and attend to your husband and children,” Mrs. Wright responded yes, but added glibly “it now seems that some think that my place is in a lunatic asylum.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Newspaper articles’ regular emphases on the deleterious effects of Christian Science study not only on the health of women but on their roles as wife and mother capitalized on the “moral crusade” motif, a device popular among newspaper publishers at the time who sought to highlight the decay of public morality by drawing sympathy for society's often unseen victims.Footnote ⁹⁸

Profiles of female insanity attributed to Christian Science additionally functioned to undermine the suitability and safety of electing Christian Science treatment rather than allopathic options. In April 1907, Miss Isabelle Hubbard was hospitalized at Bellevue Hospital in New York. The New York World described Hubbard as “a refined and highly educated young woman,” who suffered mentally despite attempts by Christian Scientists to heal her.Footnote ⁹⁹ The anguish caused her to confine herself in her room where she was heard repeatedly pounding on the walls, reciting over and over in a loud, monotone voice, “Mortal mind. Mortal mind. Mortal mind.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Hubbard's friends and neighbors reportedly expressed concern that she was going crazy, but the Scientists who were treating her, described as members of a cult, denied she was truly crazy and argued that she only thought herself to be. This denial of Hubbard's insanity was in keeping with Eddy's teaching that all disease was mental in origin. Miss Hubbard continued to depress to the point that her sister had her committed to the psychopathic ward at Bellevue. She was put under the care of Dr. Minas S. Gregory, who reported that twelve or thirteen Christian Scientists—also diagnosed as insane—were then under his treatment. Gregory declared that Miss Hubbard had “become unbalanced by the ministrations of Christian Science healers” and that, had she received medical attention months ago, she would not have become “undoubtedly insane.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ As Timothy E. W. Gloege has shown, this bold warning of the consequences of challenging medical authority had been a common tactic employed by the medical profession in establishing its cultural authority over healing since the late nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁰² Profiles of Hubbard framed her as one of the many regrettable “victims” of Christian Science who had been “carried over the Niagara of destruction when they might have been rescued in the life-boat of scientific medicine.”Footnote ¹⁰³

Mary Baker Eddy, the Insanity Charge, and the Next Friends Suit

Adding to the maelstrom of press forwarding the causal association between Christian Science and insanity was the ongoing derisive coverage of Mary Baker Eddy. Eddy had long been a favorite subject of yellow journalists who capitalized on her notoriety as a woman religious leader and the rapid growth of the Christian Science Church to concoct a range of biting reproaches that varied in integrity from borderline accuracy to the absurd. These attacks were regularly undergirded by pathological interpretations of Eddy that functioned to undermine the integrity of her motivations as a religious leader.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In December 1906, McClure's Magazine, which had recently surpassed a half million in circulation, announced to its readers a forthcoming exposé on Eddy.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The result was a muckraking biographical series that appeared in fourteen installments over the next two years attributed to the journalist Georgine Milmine; however, Willa Cather, Will Irwin and Burton Hendrick were tasked with putting Milmine's investigations into narrative form.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Milmine characterized Eddy as having several symptoms of a “serious nervous disorder,” including lifelong hysteria, a “lack of maternal feeling,” and a mania for being rocked in an adult-sized crib or swung to allay her violent hysterical seizures.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This coverage appeared at the same time that Mark Twain's critical series of essays on Eddy in the North American Review were published in book form and numerous critical public sermons and pamphlets on Christian Science were circulating.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ While some attempts were made by publications such as Cosmopolitan and The Arena to counter the negative press on Eddy and Christian Science, these publications could hardly compete with the ongoing opprobrium.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Further aggravating the storm of controversy surrounding Eddy and Christian Science was the medical establishment's long standing ire against the new religion's healing practice. As demonstrated by Rennie Schoepflin, physicians aggressively contended with Christian Science practitioners as professional competitors at the turn of the century and sought to legislate Christian Science practitioners out of existence.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Among the means physicians employed to discredit Christian Science was to frame it as neither a legitimate religion nor a healing tradition, but rather a socially contagious disease, “an enemy dangerous to public health” productive of insanity and headed by an insane old woman.Footnote ¹¹¹ By the turn of the century, over 150 medical journal articles were published that focused on deriding and dismissing the practice of Christian Science.Footnote ¹¹² During the Brush Will Case of 1901, the American Journal of Insanity seized the trial's leading question of whether or not belief in Christian Science indicated insanity. According to the journal editor's reading of the trial's proceedings, it was evident Eddy's followers demonstrated a “great number of neurotic elements, the mentally enfeebled, the hysterical and the eccentric, besides many paranoiacs and chronic sufferers from megalomania and other forms of insanity.”Footnote ¹¹³ Additionally, many physicians supported the view first forwarded in the McClure's biography that Eddy was a hysteric. In a 1907 editorial titled “Mrs. Eddy's Case of Hysteria,” published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the author submitted “as evidence only the testimony set forth in McClure's” to support that “Mrs. Eddy always has been, is, and always will be, the pitiable victim of the grand neurosis, better called grand psychosis—hysteria.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ This diagnosis not only concluded that Eddy was medically insane but positioned the religion of Christian Science as the diseased product of a female malady.

It was against this hydra of criticism levied by physicians, newspaper authors, and popular commentators that Joseph Pulitzer began crafting a plan for a new public spectacle to further drive newspaper sales. Pulitzer's New York World had seeded in the public imagination accounts of insane Christian Scientists for years leading up to the Next Friends trial. During the Brush Will Case, the question of whether Mary Baker Eddy's writings and teachings on Christian Science caused insanity was front-page news in the New York World, then the most circulated newspaper in the country. In 1906, the year before the trial, the newspaper crafted a superficial front-page sensation over the question of whether Eddy was dead, dying, or being represented by a dummy.Footnote ¹¹⁵ As such, when the New York World started detailing the Next Friends Suit in early 1907, a lawsuit predicated on the notion that Eddy was too insane to manage her estate, the newspaper already had a well-seasoned readership to consume another front-page scandal on Christian Science and madness. Pulitzer recruited William Chandler, a prominent politician and former senator from New Hampshire, to serve as lead counsel for the defense. Chandler then sent for Eddy's estranged son, George Glover, and two other “next friends,” a legal term for kin that originally referred to George's daughter, Mary Baker Glover, and cousin, George W. Baker.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Together the three were told their inheritance was at risk and that Eddy was under the control of an “unscrupulous clique of grafters” who had designs to steal Eddy's estate for themselves.Footnote ¹¹⁷ They were advised to file a lawsuit to have the estate taken out of Eddy's control and instead put in a trust. The suit was filed in Eddy's name and purported to be for her protection. However, if successful, Eddy would effectively have been removed as leader of the First Church of Christ, Science. The case was initiated in Concord, New Hampshire, on March 1, 1907. The very next day the New York World published their newest attempt at seizing the attention of American readers with front-page headlines announcing the charges against Eddy.

As a journalistic stunt or deliberate concoction of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, the details of the Next Friends Suit were thoughtfully planned to attract the most readers. This tactic was in keeping with Pulitzer's model of publishing stories that emphasized human drama and sensationalism.Footnote ¹¹⁸ It is therefore significant that Chandler eventually shifted the case's focus to Eddy's alleged insanity as the focal point of the lawsuit among all the diverse and damaging charges circulating against her at the time. Whether the “founder of the Christian Science church is and has been for many years insane” was established as the primary allegation attesting to her incapacity to execute contracts, transfer copyrights, and sell real estate. This updated legal contention was raised months after the initial filing of the lawsuit through an amendment to the bill in equity.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The choice reflects how religious insanity as a social and medical label continued to be a powerful means of defamation at the turn of the century, with the currency of the charge having appreciated through its long use in print media. The case further fed on public apprehension of the Church's rapid growth. In June 1906, only a year before the trial, thirty thousand people attended the public dedication services for the expansion of The Mother Church in Boston, the Christian Science headquarters church, which allowed for five thousand churchgoers at a single service.Footnote ¹²⁰

Chandler asserted the primary delusion forming the predicate for Eddy's general insanity was “the delusion of non-existence and unreality of the physical universe, organic and inorganic” as exhibited in her book Science and Health.Footnote ¹²¹ At the time of the trial, Eddy was eighty-six years old. Owing to her age, Judge Robert N. Chamberlain exempted Eddy from appearing in court and instead approved a committee of experts or “masters” to assess her mental state at her home, Pleasant Hill, in Concord. On August 18, 1907, the Boston American ran a front-page headline reading “Distinguished Men Deliberating Whether Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy Is or Is Not Insane,” with photographs of the court-appointed masters and Eddy's attorney surrounding a drawing of a beleaguered Eddy.Footnote ¹²² Despite the designs of the New York World, the masters found a bright and mentally competent woman. Without proof of Eddy's insanity, the case quickly began to deteriorate. In a last attempt to save the effort, Chandler's colleague Dewitt Howe argued that Christian Science was undeserving of constitutional protection because it was not truly a religion but rather a form of insane belief. The judge dismissed this line of reasoning, and, in less than a week, the case was over.

Before the end of the trial, however, Eddy's counsel, Mr. Streeter, thought it prudent to have her evaluated by another expert on insanity. They commissioned Dr. Allan McLane Hamilton, the very same physician who pronounced Christian Science belief a form of insane delusion during the Brush Will Case only a few years prior in 1901. This choice was surprising even to Hamilton, but the counsel determined his national prestige as an expert on insanity and reputation for fairness outweighed his previous formal disavowal of Christian Science.Footnote ¹²³ If he confirmed Eddy's sanity, which Streeter was confident of, there could be no further argument regarding Eddy's allegedly addled mind.Footnote ¹²⁴ Hamilton adjudged Eddy to be not only sane but to have “no visible symptoms of insanity or nervous disease” and to be a person of “extraordinary intelligence.”Footnote ¹²⁵ In this assessment, Hamilton's distinction between sane and insane delusions was essential. Whereas sane delusion was for Hamilton the “adoption and perhaps expression of a belief which is regarded by the majority of the world as untrue and baseless,” an insane delusion “exists only in the diseased imagination of the individual” and “cannot be removed by sufficient proof.”Footnote ¹²⁶ In Eddy's case, she suffered from a sane delusion. Even Eddy's belief in malicious animal magnetism, a subtle form of psychic damage inflicted between two persons, widely cited by the prosecution and the press as evidence of Eddy's insanity, was insufficient to warrant a diagnosis of insanity.

“The mere adoption of a religious belief, no matter how fantastic or improbable it may appear to many persons, is not an evidence of insanity,” Hamilton stated on the record.Footnote ¹²⁷ Therefore, Eddy's belief in Christian Science healing, even its foundational denial of matter and disease, was not indicative of madness because of its widespread nature.Footnote ¹²⁸ “There seems to be a manifest injustice in taxing so excellent and capable a woman as Mrs. Eddy with any form of insanity,” he concluded.Footnote ¹²⁹ In absolving Eddy of mental disease, Hamilton in effect switched from ardent public critic of Christian Science to measured supporter. Alfred Farlow referred to the case as a gigantic farce, an effort to discredit Eddy and stigmatize the religion, and declared the next friends were “the tools of designing men.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Even Hamilton supported this conspiratorial view of the lawsuit when he declared, “these ‘next friends’ have simply been used. The real attack has been against Christian Science.” Hamilton also admitted he had been “decidedly prejudiced” toward Eddy before assessing her, having “become imbued with a distinctly adverse feeling toward Christian Science and its chief exponent” by reading accounts in newspapers and magazines.Footnote ¹³¹

“Eddyite Has Gone Insane” reported the Boston Post in October 1907, just weeks after the end of the Next Friends Suit.Footnote ¹³² Right after the collapse of the court case, Eddy's secretary, Alfred Frye, subscribed to Luce's Press Clipping Bureau. Likely, Frye and Eddy were interested in assessing the press during the aftermath of the case to ascertain public perceptions.Footnote ¹³³ They would have found that, despite Christian Science's rapid growth in membership and church building, the new religion remained entangled with the idea of an insanity-inducing cult that seized victims, especially women, through its doctrines and false healing methods. Just as before the Brush Will and Next Friends trials, Christian Science was both identified as a cause of insanity and indicted for failing to cure it properly.Footnote ¹³⁴ As a result, the CoP continued to track articles linking Christian Science with madness, such as a report in 1909 in which Father Thomas E. Sherman warned in a sermon, “Unless there is something to offset the Christian Science teachings, the country's asylums will be a burden to the public.” Sherman, son of the famous Civil War general, sought to contrast his new faith cure practice, the Emmanuel Movement, with that of rival Christian Science. He claimed, “[I]n interviews I have had with several superintendents of insane asylums, they tell me that there are many patients in them as the result of a study of Christian Science.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Alfred Farlow of the CoP in Boston, among other CoP heads, had been battling this public impression of Christian Science as a cause of asylum admissions for years. In response to Sherman's sermon, Farlow pointed out that Sherman did not provide the names of any asylum superintendents and therefore investigating the truth of his claims was impossible. Regardless, Farlow argued that Christian Science, rather than sending people to an insane asylum, saved them from it. “I have never known an instance where insanity could be traced to Christian Science.” Conceding that he had heard of people “gone insane over the subject of religion,” Farlow reasoned that even in instances where the subject that “over-taxed” the person included Christian Science, the cause could not be rightly attributed to Christian Science any more than Presbyterianism, Methodism, or Catholicism could be held accountable for the number of their adherents held in asylums.Footnote ¹³⁶ His assertion was reinforced by another member of the CoP, Haskell Olcott, who responded to Sherman's earlier claims, saying, “It is well known that Christian Science is one of the most effective means for the cure of insanity, and in nearly all of its churches may be found persons who thankfully testify to having been saved from depression and despair, and even from suicide, through the joy and peace brought by its teachings.”Footnote ¹³⁷

In instances where physicians publicly exonerated Christian Science as a cause of madness, the CoP was quick to propagate their views. Such was the case when Dr. Albert Warren Ferris, president of the New York State Commission in Lunacy, stated in 1912 in the New York Times, “I have never found it [Christian Science] a cause in a single case. There are forms of insanity that are accompanied by religious enthusiasm of an abnormal type, and Christian Science is sometimes the form this takes. I should not call Christian Science in any way a cause of insanity, and during the past few years we have studied causes very closely.”Footnote ¹³⁸ This kind of statement served to balance less savory medical views of the religion but were drops in the bucket compared with the broader pathological lens Christian Science had been subject to. In 1910, for instance, the year of Eddy's death, alienist and neurologist Ralph Wallace Reed addressed the Ohio State Homeopathic Society in Cleveland. The aim of his speech was “to show that for many years Mrs. Eddy suffered from a major hysteria” and later a “form of mental derangement constituting a true and generally known psychosis of chronic form, from which she never recovered,” a reference to dementia praecox. Christian Science was unique among religions, according to Reed, being “the only religion that ever gave rise to a contagious disease.”Footnote ¹³⁹ Reed's speech was later published in The Lancet, one of the most prestigious medical publications, further echoing and entrenching the long-held contention that Christian Science and insanity were causally related.

The CoP's repeated attempts to deny the connection between insanity and Christian Science practice, and in the process promote its healing capacity for the insane, was premised in the religion's success in treating madness without the use of drugs and without commitments in insane asylums. Eddy viewed insanity as uniquely conducive to Christian Science healing, writing that “however obstinate the case, it [insanity] yields more readily than do most diseases to the salutary action of truth, which counteracts error.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ She heavily critiqued the institution of insane asylums and denied the efficacy of harsh drugs commonly employed in asylum medicine to treat the insane such as purgatives and narcotics.Footnote ¹⁴¹ For Eddy and Christian Scientists, only the healing effects of realizing “the omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience of the One Mind, God” discerned through the Bible and Science and Health or through treatment administered by a Christian Science practitioner could provide true healing.Footnote ¹⁴² Representatives from the CoP regularly cited Christian Science's success in healing insanity by pointing to the numerous testimonials supplied to the Christian Science Sentinel and the Christian Science Journal, as well as to the continued rapid growth of the Church of Christ, Scientist.Footnote ¹⁴³ In this context, studying Science and Health was cited as a healing influence for those plagued by madness or committed in asylums, rather than being a source of insanity as the press widely claimed. The testimonials of those who sought and experienced healing through Christian Science collectively challenged negative popular portrayals of the new religion in the press and elsewhere.