When first told that Christian Science was the same method Christ Jesus used to heal the sick, an ailing mother with three small children shot back: "What did you say? Repeat that again." Fifty years later Annie Macmillan Knott still recalled that memorable moment. Lucia C. Warren memorandum, September 20, 1932, p. 2, Archives and Library of The Mother Church. See We Knew Mary Baker Eddy (Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1979), p. 70.
The truth of what she heard was soon put to an extreme test. Her one-and-a-half-year-old son accidentally drank some carbolic acid. Two physicians predicted fatal results. In this crisis, Mrs. Knott turned to neighboring Christian Scientists for prayerful treatment. The next day, to her astonishment and joy, she found her son eating an apple—despite the medical view expressed earlier that, should he live, the boy would not be able to swallow food or liquids normally. "No words," Mrs. Knott wrote, "could ever tell my feelings, but I remembered and repeated to myself our Master's words, 'And if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them' (Mark 16:18)." Annie M. Knott reminiscences, I, pp. 3-4, Archives. See Journal, Vol. 18, February 1901, p. 681.
Annie Knott's lifelong desire to minister to the sick by becoming a doctor now found a new means of fulfillment. Instead of pursuing medical and homeopathic studies, Mrs. Knott took up the practice of Christ-healing, as presented in Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy. Within days of her son's recovery she was healing others.
