Several years before my attention was called to the teachings of Christian Science, I had been actively engaged in a social settlement in a large city. The suffering I had witnessed in the tenements from tubercular disease had always called forth my deepest sympathy, and when this disease manifested itself on me I felt it a great imposition, as I had fitted myself for the work I was doing by a hospital training and was loath to give up my interest in the problems which faced us in these social centers. After receiving the same verdict from four physicians, I reluctantly submitted to the usual treatment followed in such cases, under the care of specialists, in a resort where the climate was to be of great value in aiding my recovery. It did not fulfil any of its promises, however, and to my amazement I grew worse instead of better, and found that recovery was evidently not based on schools of medicine, climatic conditions, or any laws which I could understand.
That the mental attitude enters largely into the relief of disease, close observation in my work had convinced me, and my faith in materia medica was almost shattered by the year spent in this resort and sanitarium: but I still believed that a change of climate might help me. I was resentful and humiliated by the whole unhappy experience, and turned every way to find my health and freedom, resisting the advancing stages of the illness by refusing to see them as a menace to my life, contrary to all that materia medica had taught me. I now know, as Mrs. Eddy says in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 375) that mine was "a stage of fear so excessive" that it amounted to fortitude.
I tried the change of climate, but it was not a permanent help; the disease continued to progress, and for the first time I became much depressed and despaired of recovery. In sympathy for this condition, a physician wished me to meet a friend of his who, unknown to him, was a Christian Scientist, whose wide interests, he felt, might arouse me to a better state of mind. She told me that sickness was fear, and that God would heal me. The decisive way in which she spoke of sickness as a mental condition, and of God as near to all, gave me hope and comfort. I had inherited a religion, but its forms had never appealed to me, and it was quite impossible for me to accept the teaching of resignation to illness and death.
