The details of the situation are today wrapped in obscurity, but out of all this “chemicalization” one clear result emerged. Physical manipulation was abolished once and for all by Mrs. Glover. The students were told to erase from their manuscript copies of “The Science of Man” the one brief reference to it in that manuscript, and manipulation thereafter became the recognized badge of mesmerism.
At this point Kennedy rebelled, though an open break did not take place immediately. Two weeks after Wright’s last article Mrs. Glover’s extremely junior “partner” tore up his contract with her and announced that he no longer intended to pay her any percentage on his practice. Nonetheless, she continued to work with him for three months as best she could, trying to win him over from what she now felt was the disastrous error of his ways, especially his determination to stick to his manipulations and to what she saw as his control of his patients’ thinking.
About this time she wrote Bancroft:
I am a fish out of water; when I am dragged away from wisdom and love into the grosser abyss of folly and hate, then I am not a fish at home. Truth is, I am so tried by the malice of my students, that up to this time, or a little prior to it, I have done nothing but love and praise, that I am losing my happiness and consequently my health in the dark labyrinth into which I gaze and stand upon the brink, thinking momently, will my students plunge therein? . . .
Oh, how I have worked, pondered and constantly imparted my discoveries to this wicked boy that I shall not name and all for what! God grant me patience. Mrs. Susie Oliver told me once Richard said he thought I had suffered so much from bad students if he did not well it would kill me, but it won’t. I most fear it will ruin my sweet disposition!
I may as well jest over the absurd striplings that turn to rend me, to threaten me with disgrace and imprisonment for giving to them a discovery that money cannot pay for, but a little good breeding might have helped at least to reward the toil, and scorn, and obscurity, by which it was won for them.93
93 [Bancroft, Mrs. Eddy as I Knew Her, pp. 18–19.]