In June, 1906, my husband, who had been under medical care since the previous January, for an injury received at that time, was taken with fever, together with stomach and bowel trouble; but it was not until August that he consented to go to Kansas City, Mo., to seek healing through Christian Science. I accompanied him, and when the first treatment had so remarkably reduced these ailments, we knew the way to divine Truth had been uncovered for us, and that our future development would be measured by our application to the study of this, to us, new and wonderful teaching.
Knowing this, and also that during the fall and winter I should be in an out-of-the-way Utah town, where there were no Christian Scientists, I provided myself with nearly all of Mrs. Eddy's books and whatever tracts, leaflets, and pamphlets I could find in the Christian Science Reading Rooms at Salt Lake City. During the winter I was thirty miles from the nearest telephone and over one hundred miles from other Scientists, and it seemed as if I was never before so tempted in the same length of time; but in the end I was led to be thankful for the struggles I had to make to overcome throat, kidney, and rheumatic trouble, as they drove me to read and reread Science and Health, also the Bible, as explained by that wonderful "Key to the Scriptures," and "Miscellaneous Writings," in my desire to know how to deny and silence these errors.
Long before I began the study of Science and Health, I had lost all faith in materia medica; but if I had believed in it, the mountain divide between northwestern Utah and Idaho lay between me and the nearest doctor, forty five miles away. At that season of the year (February) the snow was very deep, and even when the roads were at their best a doctor's fee for each visit to this Utah oasis was fifty dollars. I was the principal of a graded school, and at the time of my last and worst attack of illness there were still sixty days to teach in order to complete the term, and I needed the salary as well as the healing. At times I seemed helpless, and as I had formerly been strong and active, this condition would have frightened me but for the fact that I knew people who, through Christian Science, had been brought out of much worse conditions than mine, and who were now perfectly well. I knew that in thousands of cases before mine the truth had been proven better, surer, more comforting and healing than any doctor or medicine, and that what the knowledge gained from Science and Health had done for others, it could and would do for me.
