Teacher: Christian Science Healing
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Writing Science and Health
Mrs. Eddy’s home on Broad St., Lynn, Mass.
The writing of Science and Health went on during three arduous years, from 1872 to 1875. The growing manuscript drew on what she had learned while writing her extensive Bible notes and her notes for classroom teaching. It drew many lessons from what she had proven in her healing work. But most of what filled the pages each day came in a flood of inspiration and insight. The rush of words raced across sheets of paper that often spilled from her lap and lay scattered around her on the floor.
By the fall of 1873 she was bundling up the pages and offering her manuscript to Boston publishers. They were not interested. She would have to become her own publisher.
In 1875 she purchased a house on Broad Street, Lynn. There in a small room under the eaves she completed the manuscript, adding fourteen important pages, inserted within the last chapter, “Healing the Sick.” The topic in these pages would evolve later into a separate chapter, “Animal Magnetism Unmasked.”
She found a printer and began the labor of proofing and correcting the often botched work of a typesetter who repeatedly altered wording he judged hard to understand. The task was tedious, but the work went on. By the end of the year, 1875, the book was published.
The next year, 1876, bookstores were displaying a new work from the Christian Science Publishing Company: Science and Health, by Mary B. Glover.
During the next thirty-five years she would edit this textbook over and over, refining and clarifying its message through eight major revisions and well over four hundred printings (which averaged a thousand copies each).
Since that first edition in 1875 until today, the book that publishers predicted would never interest the public has found millions of readers worldwide.
