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.
When I came home my medical friends joked me unmercifully about what they termed my adventures, and I facetiously detailed my ignorant misconception of the subject for many amused crowds; yet when they gave me adverse articles from their medical journals to send my new acquaintances, I would read them over and invariably remark that they did not touch the point. I could see that every one argued against a misapprehension of Christian Science.
This state of affairs lasted until about Christmas, 1902, when I had an experience which proved to me that drugs have no invariable or intrinsic power, and which has since shown me the difference between a blind faith in a corporeal God and the scientific knowledge of the divine Principle of the universe, which, when rightly applied, can be absolutely relied upon to remove all discordant conditions, no matter what the circumstances. My freedom from ill effects from a dose of poison, taken by mistake when fainting from the intense pain in my shoulders, could at best be but the result of a blind faith in the Master's promise, "If they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them." It was but one belief casting out another, for I did not then know why the poison could not hurt. I was ignorant of the real nature of the universe and its Ruler. Another day I might not have been able to summon sufficient faith, and I then knew no positive rule, changeless like its Maker, but the accident opened up to me a new line of thought. I could see that having faith in God meant having none in the poison, therefore the only power drugs had was one of faith,—my faith and that of all the ages. All my theories were upset, and all my previous training. The more I thought of it the more bewildered I became. The Bible injunction to heal the sick had always appealed to me, but I had never doubted that physicians were following it in the divinely appointed way. The study of the subject convinced me that the practice of medicine was built on man-made laws, and the more I read the Bible the more thoroughly convinced I became that we must eventually get back to the system that Jesus practised and taught his disciples, a system which discriminates between God's law and the mortal belief concerning law.
While I never felt the least sickness from the poison, there were some things in connection with the accident which prevented me from calling my freedom from ill effects a demonstration. At that time I had no real knowledge of what was meant by "demonstration," and while my reasoning had been perfectly clear to me, I could not explain my thought to others. The great significance of the thing to me, the only thing which gave it value, was the lesson that was indelibly impressed on my thought. Thenceforward drugs that had alleviated my disease lost their effect, nor did an entirely new series of medicine produce any, proving the correctness of my reasoning, that drugs have no inherent power.—my knowledge of wherein their apparent power lay had destroyed their effect. My Bible reading more and more unsettled my thought, I was restless, could sleep but little, and my arms grew worse, the pain was intense, the swellings like coals of fire, every movement of my shoulders increased the discharge, and medicine would not relieve them, so I gave up all medicine. Just at this point a treatise on "suggestive therapeutics" was put into my hands as a possible solution of what was puzzling me. I read it, and many other volumes on "mental science," but there was no help for me in them. I was looking for the system based on the knowledge of God and His laws, and I had already seen the unreliability of the human mind. I went into the writings of older philosophers, but soon found that their ideas were foreign to what I was seeking. All the time I spent studying these things was worse than wasted; finally, on what seemed the impulse of a moment, I went down and bought a copy of Science and Health from a practitioner. I had no idea that I would find anything in it, and thought I could tell if there was by skimming through it, as I had already read so much that was useless.
I finished the book in four days, reading between prescriptions, on the cars, at home, almost all night. On the day that I finished it I met the practitioner. "How are you getting along with the book?" said he. "I have read it all, and there is nothing in it new to me," said I. Then he told me I had read it too fast, to try it again, and read slowly. I did not know what else to do, and I was very discouraged, so I began to read it again, and to mark everything I doubted, or did not understand, with a question mark. Every few pages I would go back and rub out a mark, until finally I had rubbed out all but two, then after a talk with the practitioner I rubbed them out. I had found what I was seeking. When I was about through with my second reading of the book, my mother threatened to have hypnotism tried if my arms were not immediately better; so, without saying anything to any one about it, I put my case in the practitioner's hands. One place in my shoulder had been discharging intermittently for a year and a half, ever since the surgeon opened it. In four treatments, three present, one absent, the shoulder was well, with only a slight scar, and the practitioner discontinued the treatment. By the end of the week all signs of the disease were gone, even the scar.
Medicine could not have cured me. Even had it seemed to relieve me for a time of the troublesome manifestations of disease, it could not have removed them permanently, for it did not remove the aggravating cause. To give an inanimate drug to one in my condition was a case of giving a stone to one asking for bread. I was facing problems that older and wiser ones than I had failed to solve. While my medical work had filled me with a greater desire to heal the sick, it had also shattered many of my most cherished ideals, and I had become very cynical. I was not able to grasp the first part of the verse, "Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever," but I had already begun to think the last clause contained a statement of the foundation of all disease. During my first treatment, the impersonal nature of evil, the difference between God's spiritual man and the material counterfeit, came to me in a flood of light,—my cynicism necessarily vanished.
My conversion did not change my ambition, merely the method of achieving it, so of course I wanted to get out of the drug work. For several reasons it did not seem best to do so immediately, and I agreed with my employers for a certain term. When that expired I had no definite idea of what I should do, although I had been considering several different lines of work, and it was necessary to obtain employment at once. I left the office when the time came, and had not been at home an hour when I received a telegram calling me to a position as teacher in another state.
I could relate many more instances of help received. Light has been thrown on every question I have been called upon to solve, and my experience has covered many phases of the subject. Frequently I have been asked if I did not hate to make the sacrifice of a few things I had to part with. I have not made any sacrifice; it seems to me that I never had anything before I came into Christian Science. To one who has gained from Christian Science what I have, there can be not even a sense of sacrifice. Daily, as proof after proof strengthens the foundation on which I stand, I, too, can use those words of Martin Luther's which are to be found in Science and Health, at the head of the chapter on "Science of Being."—"Here I stand. I can do no otherwise."— Nashville, Tenn.
