Some of the accounts of healing accomplished by Christian Science seemed to me almost too wonderful to be true until an experience came into my own life that was as wonderful as any of which I had read. In August, 1914, my son, then nineteen years of age, who is on a farm a few miles from Sioux City, Iowa, at about sundown one night was driving through a gate an angry boar, which was foaming at the mouth, when with no warning the animal jumped at him. He was on a down-hill slope when the animal, weighing over five hundred pounds, knocked him on to his back and was on him in a twinkling. He called to his sister, who was standing near, and with remarkable presence of mind she picked up an axe and threw it in such a manner as to strike the animal, causing him to run away, but not until he had bruised and torn the boy cruelly, leaving a long gash, made with a tusk, immediately over the heart, so that that organ was exposed and he was unable to rise. All his clothing was torn off except his shoes.
The sister had to run a quarter of a mile to telephone for help, and when the doctor and the boy's uncle arrived from a small town about a mile away they were unable to get him to the house. Finally he was put into a rude conveyance and drawn there by a horse. He was too heavy to be carried in, however, so he remained where he was until the ambulance arrived an hour and a half later. He was then taken to a hospital in Sioux City and hastily operated on in the night, but it was scarcely anticipated that he could live through the process, as three rows of stitches were required to close the wound. While preparations for the operation were being made, a telephone message was sent to me at Norfolk, Neb., seventy-five miles away. I immediately began treatment for him and procured the assistance of a Christian Science practitioner. Then I took the first train, and reached his bedside in the hospital at about eleven o'clock the next day.
The third day after the accident, while my son's life hung in the balance and it seemed as though each breath must be his last, the practitioner was sent for and spent a few hours with him. Before he left, the boy had begun to show slight signs of life and improvement, and in a month he was able to walk and leave the hospital. When the stitches were taken out they had to be probed for, and when the special nurse who had been with him all the time was asked the reason for this, she said no one thought they would ever have to be taken out, as it was not thought he could live.
