The Religio-Medical Masquerade: A Complete Exposure of Christian Science. Frederick William Peabody
I recently talked with a lady who had been visiting her Christian Science sister whose little boy, eight or ten years of age, became sick during my friend’s visit. He went to his mother and said, “Mother, I have a terrible pain and feel very sick, and think I ought to have a doctor.”
What did the Christian Science mother do? Did she coddle the little fellow, take off his clothes and put him to bed and tell him the good doctor would soon be there and that he would be all well again very shortly? Nothing of the kind. “Richard,” she said, “it is very wrong of you to talk that way, when you have that error of belief. You know you are not sick, Richard, and cannot be sick; you know how to treat yourself when you have that false belief. Treat yourself, run away and play, and don’t bother me any more.”
Little Richard turned from his Christian Science mother and resumed his play, so long as he could stagger about on his little feet and keep up the sad pretense. And when he could not keep on his feet any longer, he sat down upon the floor with his toys about him, moaning with pain and holding his hand upon his side. Meantime his Christian Science mother busied herself about her family duties, totally ignoring him.
The time came when little Richard could not any longer sit up and completely lost interest in his toys; and then he fell over upon the floor, and died—died with his clothes on, died with his toys about him, died absolutely neglected by his mother in his extremity, died without the slightest sane endeavor to save his life.
And so it is everywhere in Christian Science families throughout the length and breadth of this land. Nothing but the employment of a fool-man or a fool-woman, called a Christian Science healer, to administer a Christian Science treatment, which consists only of the inaudible repetition of Mrs. Eddy’s meaningless jargon, can be done by a Christian Science parent to save the life of his child without repudiating Mrs. Eddy’s fundamental teaching that sickness is unreal and giving the lie to her “inspired” insanity that there are no such things as pain and death.
Who has not, for years past, read such items as these in the daily papers? “Christian Science parent arrested. Mr. and Mrs. Goodwin’s twelve years’ old child died without medical attendance.”
Again: “Jail term for Christian Scientist Brine, who let his six-year-old child die without medical attendance.”
Again: “No medicine for dying boy. Public prosecutor to take up case of year-old son of Frank A. Black, who died on Saturday without medical attendance.”
Again: “Mr. and Mrs. Edwin M. Watson, Christian Scientists, convicted of voluntary manslaughter for failure to provide medical attendance for their seven-year-old child, Granville.”
Again: “Little Esther Quimby, the seven-year-old daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Quimby, Christian Scientists, allowed to die of malignant diphtheria without attendance of a doctor.”
There was in this country in the neighborhood of 5,000 advertising Christian Science healers, so called, and their patients are largely women and children. If each of them has but one patient a day, there are over a million and a half lives annually placed under their senseless and impotent ministrations. As they doubtless average many more than one a day, their patients are in the aggregate many millions a year, largely women, still more largely children. There are no statistics showing the mortality of such patients, for it is the practice of these healers to conceal their operations by calling in a physician at the last moment to qualify him to give the necessary death certificate, in order that there may be no investigation of their criminal practices. It cannot be doubted, however, that the sacrifice of child life to this stupid and cruel monster runs up into the hundreds, if not the thousands, annually. Could anything be more hideous?
But what, may I ask, does Mary Baker G. Eddy care about the sacrifice of children, so only that her bank account continue to grow and grow and grow?
Her concern for children generally may be somewhat judged by her regard for the only child she ever brought into the world. Mrs. Eddy, when she was Mrs. Glover, in September, 1844, gave birth to her only child, a son, whom she named after his father, George Washington Glover. As a young infant, George lived at his aunt’s house with his mother, who, however, frequently sent him on long visits to the family of John Varney, the hired man (in whose lap it was her custom, when a young widow, to be rocked to sleep at night), and also to Mahala Sanborn, who had attended her at the boy’s birth.
When he was seven years old, Miss Sanborn, who had become Mrs. Cheeney, took him, at his mother’s request, permanently to live with her in North Groton, New Hampshire, where he was from 1851 to 1857, when the Cheeneys moved to Enterprise, Minnesota, taking George with them. During the larger part of his life in North Groton, Mrs. Eddy lived in the same town, but she seldom saw him, and did nothing for him. She abandoned him, in other words, to an entirely illiterate person who had lived as a servant in her father’s family. As her father said, she acted “just like an old ewe sheep that would not own its lamb.”
Mrs. Eddy now pretends that she was obliged to give up her child because her second husband, Patterson, would not have him in the house. This seems to me a poor reason for a woman to abandon her infant child, but it is not true in Mrs. Eddy’s case, because she did not acquire Mr. Patterson until years after she had permanently abandoned her child. So complete was her neglect, so utter her abandonment of him that at the age of sixty-five this man, born of New England parents, can neither read nor write! A mother who is so unmotherly as Mrs. Eddy was toward her only child when it was little more than a baby, cannot be expected to give herself great concern over the sacrifice of the children of strangers that is incidental to the accumulation of her fortune.
If the adult prefer foolishness to wisdom, if he prefer suicide to life, by the Christian Science or any other method, he may enjoy his preference. It is no business of mine to come between him and the grave; but no man and no woman has any right, whatever be the motive or the relation, to stand silently by and permit a child needlessly to suffer and needlessly to die. The laws of the land should provide, as they do in some States, for the punishment of such cruel offences; and to the extent that my opposition and my protest may avail, no man and no woman shall be permitted to murder little children by a wilful neglect that is based upon an insane belief in the wicked teachings of a wicked woman, in her cruel, greedy fraud, in her brazen, murderous lies.
If any one be disposed to feel that my language sounds extravagant thus early in the narrative, I beg that judgment may be suspended until I have concluded, when the moderation of my speech will, I think, be cause for wonder.
Chapter II
The Detached Heart
Mary Baker Glover Eddy was born in the town of Bow, New Hampshire, on July 16, 1821, of good New England parentage; but never received anything but the most rudimentary education. The stories of her higher education are all fables. She pretends to have studied the classic languages, and to have been familiar with Hebrew. She has never known anything of any of these languages, and any one who has been compelled, as I have, to peruse her unedited personal correspondence knows that she has never been on any, but the most distant of speaking terms, with her mother tongue. She was graduated, she says, from Dyer H. Sanborn’s Academy at Tilton, New Hampshire; but her old schoolmates, still living, say there was no such academy, although Sanborn did teach a few children each year in a room over the district school. There was no regular course of study and were no graduations. According to these same schoolmates, Mary Baker completed her education upon reaching long division in arithmetic, and her culture, in advanced years, may be somewhat gauged by her written attribution in her seventieth year, when, if ever, one’s education may be assumed to have made some little progress, of the authorship of Irving to the Pickwick Papers of Charles Dickens. “The language is decaying as fast,” she says, “as that of Irving’s Pickwick Papers.”
One may be moved, by this reflection upon our poor speech, to something like commiseration for the language that has been so useful to us for centuries past. But it is consoling