page_title: Christian Science
section_title: Fall in Lynn
hierarchical_section_title: Christian Science / Birth / Fall in Lynn
caption_attribution_description: English: Mary Baker Eddy Historic House - Swampscott, Massachusetts. Photograph taken by me, March 2006.
context_page_description: Christian Science is a set of beliefs associated with members of the Church of Christ, Scientist. Adherents are commonly known as Christian Scientists or students of Christian Science, and the church is sometimes informally known as the Christian Science church. It originated in 19th-century New England with Mary Baker Eddy, who argued in her 1875 book Science and Health that sickness can be healed by prayer. The book became Christian Science's central text, along with the Bible, and by 2001 had sold over nine million copies.
  Eddy and 26 followers were granted a charter in 1879 to found the Church of Christ, Scientist, and in 1894 the Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, was built in Boston, Massachusetts. Christian Science became the fastest growing religion in the United States, with nearly 270,000 members there by 1936, a figure that had declined by 1990 to just over 100,000, and by 2009 reportedly to under 50,000. The church publishes a newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor, which won seven Pulitzer Prizes between 1950 and 2002, and runs Reading Rooms around the world.
context_section_description: Quimby died on January 16, 1866, three months after Eddy's father. Eddy wrote a poem on January 22, "Lines on the Death of Dr. P. P. Quimby, Who Healed with the Truth that Christ Taught, in Contradistinction to All Isms," which was published in a local newspaper. Two weeks later, on February 1, she slipped on ice in Lynn, Massachusetts, injuring her head and neck:
  Mrs. Mary Patterson, of Swampscott, fell upon the ice near the corner of Market and Oxford streets, on Thursday evening, and was severely injured. She was taken up in an insensible condition and carried into the residence of S. M. Bubier, Esq., near by, where she was kindly cared for during the night. Dr. Cushing, who was called, found her injuries to be internal, and of a severe nature, inducing spasms and internal suffering. She was removed to her home in Swampscott yesterday afternoon, though in a very critical condition.
  Christian Scientists call this "the fall in Lynn" and see it as the birth of their religion. Decades later Eddy wrote that, on the third day after the fall, she had been helped by reading a certain Bible passage. In several editions of Science and Health she identified it as Mark 3, but later said that it had been Matthew 9:2–8, a passage about Jesus healing the paralytic at Capernaum: "As I read, the healing Truth dawned upon my sense; and the result was that I rose, dressed myself, and ever after was in better health than I had before enjoyed." The physician who treated her, Alvin M. Cushing, swore in an affidavit in 1907 that the injury had not been a serious one, and that Eddy had responded to morphine and a homeopathic remedy; she had not said anything to him about a miraculous healing.
  The fall in Lynn in 1866 was one of several experiences Eddy associated with the development of mental healing. In the first edition of Science and Health (1875), she wrote that she had "made our first discovery that science mentally applied would heal the sick" in 1864, while she was seeing Quimby, and in 1883 told the Boston Post that she had "laid the foundations of mental healing" in 1853, when she was practising homeopathy. Elsewhere in the first edition of Science and Health she attributed the discovery to her difficulties with chronic indigestion as a child. In other editions she attributes the same difficulties to someone else. Eddy first linked the fall in Lynn to Christian Science in 1871, in a letter to a prospective student:
  
  I have demonstrated on myself in an injury occasioned by a fall, that it [her healing method] did for me what surgeons could not do. Dr. Cushing of this city pronounced my injury incurable and that I could not survive three days because of it, when on the third day I rose from my bed and to the utter confusion of all I commenced my usual avocations and notwithstanding displacements, etc., I regained the natural position and functions of the body.
  Whether Eddy considered herself healed at the time is unclear. Two weeks after the fall she requested treatment from another patient of Quimby's, Julius Dresser.
  Dresser replied: "The true way to establish it is, as I look at it, to lecture and by a paper and make that the means, rather more than the curing, to introduce the truth." In June that year the Mayor of Lynn told the city Eddy had sent them a letter "in which she states that owing to the unsafe condition of [the streets] ... she slipped and fell, causing serious personal injuries, from which she has little prospect of recovering, and asking for pecuniary recompense for the injuries received." In February 1867 Eddy and her husband, Daniel Patterson, a dentist, filed a lawsuit against the city to recover damages.
caption: Eddy and her husband were living on the second floor of this house at 23 Paradise Road, Swampscott, Massachusetts, when Eddy experienced the fall in Lynn.
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