EDDY, MARY BAKER GLOVER: Founder of " Christian Science "; b. at Bow, near Concord, N. H., July 16, 1821. Her maiden name was Mary Ambrose Morse Baker; she is of Scotch-English extraction, and numbers among her ancestors a member of the Provincial Congress and soldiers in the war of the Revolution. She received her education at an academy at Tilton, N. H., and from private tutors. Her first church connection was with the Congregational Church at Tilton, which she joined July 26, 1838. She married George Washington Glover, a bricklayer, in Dec., 1843, and went with him to his home in Wilmington, S. C., where she was left a widow in June, 1844, and returned to New Hampshire soon after, where her only child, George Washington Glover, was born in Sept. of the same year. In 1853 she married Daniel Patterson (d. 1896), a dentist, from whom she obtained a divorce in 1873 on the ground of desertion. From childhood she had been weakly in constitution and subject at times to violent hysteria, and in 1862 she came into touch with Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (d. Jan. 16, 1866), a healer who after various experiments believed that he had discovered in mental control the secret of Christ's power of healing, and had spoken of his system as " Science of health (and happiness)," " Science of Christ," and once or twice as "Christian Science." She believed herself healed, and after 1864 began to practise his system on herself and others, then to give instruction in the methods of treatment to others. The first attempt at an organization to embody her principles was made at Lynn in 1875. She was married to Asa Gilbert Eddy Jan. 1, 1877 (d. 1888). The Church of Christ, Scientist, later known as the "mother church," was organized by her in Boston in 1879. She also founded the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, which received its charter in 1881, and in 1883 established the Christian Science Journal. For the wide-spread denomination founded by her see Science, Christian. She has written Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures (the text-book of her system; many subsequent editions; Boston, 1875); Christian Healing (1886); People's Idea of God (1886); Unity of Good (1891); Rudimental Divine Science (1891); No and Yes (1891); Retrospection and. Introspection (1892); Manual (1895); Miscellaneous Writings (1896); Christ and Christmas (1897); Pulpit and Press (1898); Christian Science versus Pantheism (1898); Message to the Mother Church (1900); Our Leader's Message (1901); and Truth versus Error (1905).

Bibliography: A. Brisbane, Mary Baker G. Eddy, Boston, 1908.