Ever since I was a small child I wanted to be a trained nurse and bent every effort in that direction. When I had finished my college studies, where I made a specialty of physical science, I was yet too young to enter the hospital, so I went into a physician's dispensary to gain practice in pharmacy, and to find out if I were really fitted for the desired work. Deeply interested, I remained there three years and a half, two years of which passed before I heard of Christian Science except as a matter of ridicule. Ambitious to know the practice of medicine thoroughly, reading daily from a large medical library, studying pharmacal chemistry and botany with the most intense interest, it would be difficult to find one more thoroughly dominated by medical theories than I was when Christian Science found me. I wanted to know the food value of every article of diet, and its adaptability to every kind of person. If I looked at a plant, its pharmacal name and value were uppermost in my thought; I theorized on the idiosyncrasies of every one I met, and never heard an ailment mentioned without running over in my mind the possible value of a dozen different remedies to effect a cure. In short, my whole thought was centered on materia medica and its laws.
When I had been in the office a year I was suddenly taken sick, and the surgeon who had charge of my case told my mother I had scrofula, and that it had its root in the consumption which had proven fatal in my father's family. Then followed a year of alternate better and worse, until finally I had an illness severe enough to keep me in bed, and I gave up, utterly discouraged. The disease was manifested in the glands of my shoulders, and I knew I would never be accepted for training in any hospital. I could not lift my arms from the shoulders. As soon as I was able to be out my physician urged a trip north, and obtained for me a chaperone through a friend. I was somewhat dismayed when I found her to be a Christian Scientist, a I felt too weak to argue, and too discouraged to listen to any sanctimonious sermonizing, but I soon found that I had to do neither. My physician wrote me, jokingly, to go ahead and learn all I could, and tell him about it when I came home. Most of the people I met were Christian Scientists, and I accepted conditions that seemed to me Utopian without knowing that the restfulness, the gentle helpfulness I felt, and the absence of such topics as disease, death, poverty, the failings of others, were the results of a knowledge of the true Science of Life, and a desire on the part of each to manifest it daily. I did not antagonize, neither was I particularly interested. I would not read any of the literature which was at hand all over the house, although I was rather curious to see what there could be in a book the reading of which would heal disease.
When I left Buffalo, September 5, 1902, my friend asked me to get a copy of Science and Health and read it. I laughingly told her I would get one the fifth of the next September (1903), and in the mean time I would read the Bible through, as I usually did in the course of a year, and if there was anything in Christian Science I should be sure to get it, because I had always wanted the truth at any price. I said if it came from the Bible, it was there for any honest seeker. I have learned that it is all there, but I did not find it until my last medical prop had been knocked away, and the Christian Science text-book had turned a searchlight on my innermost thoughts, cleared out the "old wives' fables," the philosophies and vain deceits, and taught me "honestly" to seek for truth.
