Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/117

Rh The physician attending said I had taken the last step I ever should, but in two days I got out of my bed alone and will walk; but yet I confess I am frightened, and out of that nervous heat my friends are forming, spite of me, the terrible spinal affection from which I have suffered so long and hopelessly. . . . Now can't you help me? I believe you can. I write this with this feeling: I think that I could help another in my condition if they had not placed their intelligence in matter. This I have not done, and yet I am slowly failing. Won't you write me if you will undertake for me if I can get to you?

In this letter, although it was written two weeks after the mishap in question, Mrs. Eddy makes no reference to a miraculous recovery. In fact, she apparently fears a return of her old spinal trouble and asks Mr. Dresser to protect her against it by the Quimby method. She adds that, although she has not placed her "intelligence in matter," she is "slowly failing."

In the first edition of Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy refers to this recovery, but merely as an interesting demonstration of Scientific healing. She also describes it in a letter written in 1871 to Mr. W. W. Wright. Wright, a well-known citizen of Lynn, and a prospective student, addressed several questions to Mrs. Eddy concerning Christian Science. "What do you claim for it," he says, "in cases of sprains, broken limbs, cuts, bruises, etc., when a surgeon's services are generally required?" To which Mrs. Eddy, then Mrs. Glover, replied:

I have demonstrated upon myself in an injury occasioned by a fall, that it did for me what surgeons could not do. Dr. Cushing of this city pronounced my injury incurable and that I could not survive three days because of it, when on the third day I rose from my bed and to the utter confusion of all I commenced my usual avocations and notwithstanding displacements, etc., I regained the natural position and functions of the body. How far my students can demonstrate in such extreme cases depends on the progress they have made in this Science.

Here again Mrs. Eddy cites the experience merely as a