In the one hundred and twenty-five years since Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures was published, thousands of people have come to think of the book not only as a guide to the understanding of God, but as a physician as well. Mary Baker Eddy predicted this phenomenon in the book itself, where she writes: "If the reader of this book observes a great stir throughout his whole system, and certain moral and physical symptoms seem aggravated, these indications are favorable. Continue to read, and the book will become the physician, allaying the tremor which Truth often brings to error when destroying it." Science and Health, p. 422.
Although medical diagnosis and treatment have developed greatly over the past hundred years, there's also been an increasingly strong interest in a spiritual approach to both prevention and cure of disease. Every week since its establishment in 1883, the Journal has received letters from people who have been healed through the ideas in Science and Health—and it has published roughly ten thousand of them. It may be instructive to consider how a book can act as a physician by looking at one of these accounts.
A letter in 1890 from a woman identified only by the initials E.D.S. is fairly typical of hundreds of other letters from readers of the book at that time. She spoke of suffering for years from "a complication of diseases," including dyspepsia (indigestion), chronic pain in her side when lifting, and pain in the kidneys. As she read Science and Health, she was healed of the dyspepsia and side pain. Still troubled by the kidney difficulty, she began to give herself "treatments" based on what she was learning from the book. "I followed no formula," she wrote, "and I needed none. A cry for help, knowing it would be answered; precious texts from the Bible, which had already become like a new book to me; sweet assurance of faith by the witnessing Spirit; strong logical conclusions, learned from Science and Health' what a wealth of material!" The Christian journal, Vol. VII, pp. 516-17 . She reported that she was now healthy, and had also healed her husband of a fever in ten minutes, and a woman of chronic headaches and dysentery.
