THE BY-LAW "CHRISTIAN SCIENCE NURSE" in the Manual of The Mother Church (p. 49) opens with the words "A member of The Mother Church . . ." So the story of Christian Science nursing is really a story of individuals—men and women whose faithful lives illustrate the wisdom and authority of the By-Law Mary Baker Eddy introduced 100 years ago.
Here's one shining example: Carolyn Hill, of Silver Spring, Maryland, tells the story of when her mother, at the age of seven, was severely burned. At the time, in 1917, her mom had stepped out of the bathtub one evening and sat on a hot steam radiator, badly burning herself. Carolyn's grandmother, the manager of the Oakland, California, apartment building where they lived, remembered that one of the tenants was a nurse. She sent her son upstairs to ask this nurse to come right away. What she didn't realize was that this neighbor was a Christian Science nurse, meaning that first and foremost, she was prepared to demonstrate her understanding of Christian Science. According to Carolyn's mother, when the Christian Science nurse arrived there was such a sense of love in the room, that her mother was immediately healed. Today, Carolyn is a Christian Science nurse.
"It requires courage to utter truth . . ." (Science and Health, p. 97), and no one needs to utter truth more steadfastly or earnestly than one who confronts head-on vivid pictures of illness and urgency. One of the most courageous things Christian Science nurses have done over the decades is to insist, in the face of an increasingly insistent medical establishment, that the sick can be healed without material remedies and that they can be nursed without adopting medical theories and practices. There is a way to nurse based on spiritually scientific principles. This nursing method involves spiritual wisdom and discernment. And it supports spiritual healing, where material approaches would undermine it.
