Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/369

Rh case. In the spring of 1888 Mrs. Abby H. Corner, a student and member of the Association, had attended her daughter in childbirth and the accouchement terminated fatally to both mother and child. Mrs. Corner was prosecuted for malpractise by the state but was acquitted when the facts were brought out that the cause of death was one which a medical practitioner could not have averted, namely hemorrhage. Certain members of the Association disagreed with Mrs. Eddy in respect to the propriety of certain proceedings relative to Mrs. Corner’s defense.

Although Mrs. Eddy did not approve of her students taking charge of the surgical part of obstetrical work unless they were surgeons or midwives duly qualified by the state requirements, she did not desert her student in time of trouble, and although the Association paid Mrs. Corner’s expenditures for defense, — a matter of two hundred dollars, — the disagreement over the Corner case was what the restless element in the Boston church needed for a plausible excuse to seek the world and its freedom, and to desert the pure ideality of the fundamental statement of Christian Science found in the scientific statement of being. Mrs. Eddy did not engage in any spiritual wrestling with these rebellious students, though she did ask them to come to her in Christian love and state their grievances to her personally. As none of them did so, they were eventually dismissed, thirty-six members going out of a congregation of about two hundred.