Concord, New Hampshire, Summer 1890. She had come a long way from those hungry years in Lynn, Massachusetts, in the 1860s and 1870s. Above all, Mary Baker Eddy had been moved by a deep spiritual hunger—the hunger of someone on fire with the desire to help people find a reliable path to health and wholeness.
Along the way she'd also felt the pangs of physical hunger. "My family refused to aid me in what they thought was fanatical," a friend later recalled her saying, "and often I went hungry in order to save money for my work." From the Reminiscences of Anna B. White Baker, The Mary Baker Eddy Collection, The Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity.
The heart and soul of that work was a book that she urgently wanted to get out beyond the limited confines of Lynn and Boston to seekers with a spiritual hunger like hers. The first edition of Science and Health had been published nearly 15 years earlier. It was the product of three years of solitary writing, preceded by several years of research and note-taking on insights into the Bible, conversations, classes she taught on the metaphysics of Christian healing, and the author's growing, prayer-based healing practice.
