Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/420

366 to be used in curing insanity are the same as in other diseases: namely, the impossibility that matter, brain, can control or derange the mind, can suffer or cause suffering.

If a crisis occurs in your treatment, you must treat the patient less for the disease and more for the mental fermentation.

When the unthinking lobster loses his claw, it grows again. If the Science of Life were understood, it would be found that the senses of Mind are never lost, and that matter has no sensation. Then the human limb would be replaced as readily as the lobster's claw.

The healers were recruited from every walk of life—schoolteachers, milliners, dressmakers, music-teachers; elocutionists, mothers of families, and young women who had been trained to no vocation at all. Among the male practitioners—they were greatly in the minority—there were even a few converts from the regular schools of medicine, but their contributions to the Journal are so disorderly and inexact, and in some cases so illiterate, as to indicate that their success in the practice of medicine was very questionable. In the first years of her college, Mrs. Eddy's consulting physician in instrumental surgery was, the reader will remember, Charles J. Eastman, afterward imprisoned for criminal practice. There were, however, among her early practitioners, honest and worthy men. One of the most successful of these was Captain Joseph S. Eastaman, for many years a leading Christian Science practitioner in Boston, and who is still practising in Cambridge.

When he went to Mrs. Eddy to lay before her the case of his sick wife, Mr. Eastaman had been a sea-captain for twenty-one years, having begun his apprenticeship to the sea when he was thirteen, as cabin-boy on board an English brig. If the old seaman soon became docile like the other men about