● ● ● able to sit and work.”82 In the summer of 1849 she spent two months in Warner, New Hampshire, under the treatment of Dr. Parsons Whidden, and her mother at that time expressed an anxious hope that “she may be releiv’d from her distresess the Dr sayes she could not live long as she was.”83
Her regular physician was Dr. Nathaniel Ladd. Disentangled from the fantasies spun by later legend,84 his diagnosis appears to have been that the dyspepsia which constituted her chief suffering was caused by a disease of the spinal nerves, there being “a connection between stomach and spine.”85 Such a theory was typical of the medical impressionism which flourished between the decline of the old “heroic” school of medicine, with its humoral theories, its bleeding and purging, and the rise of the new clinical school with its headquarters in France.
It is hardly surprising that Dr. Ladd’s treatment was of no avail. Psychosomatic medicine was not to appear on the scene for almost another century, and even then doctors would be little inclined to pay attention to the possible theological causes of nervous disease. Ladd may well have been baffled by the distressing course of his patient’s multiple ailments, and his bafflement may sometimes have taken the form of exasperation with the nervous paroxysms which seized her ● ● ●
82 Abigail Ambrose Baker to George Sullivan Baker, 26 December 1847, 1919.001.0046, LMC [bracketed text Peel’s].
↑84 Such a legend is the Milmine statement that Dr. Ladd diagnosed Mrs. Glover’s trouble as “hysteria mingled with bad temper.” [Georgine Milmine, “Mary Baker G. Eddy: The Story of Her Life and the History of Christian Science,” McClure’s, January 1907, p. 236.] This charge was made in a letter to Miss Milmine by a second cousin of Mrs. Eddy’s, Mrs. Mary C. Whittier, who was fourteen years old at the time of Mrs. Baker’s death and in her seventies when she volunteered this information. In the same letter she went on to say of Mrs. Eddy: “Even good sensible people about everything else, to be carried away with this woman, will prove one of the rounds of ‘witch craft’—and if the managers of public affairs were on duty as in Salem 100 yrs ago, I’m sure she’d have the same treatment and her life taken upon the gallows.” [Mary C. Whittier to Georgine Milmine, 19 August 1905, LSC004, MBEL.] This amiable old lady seems rather flimsy authority for a statement which runs contrary to the first-hand evidence regarding Ladd’s view of Mrs. Glover. It was doubtless her use of such “authorities” as this that caused Milmine later to write Dr. Lyman P. Powell that not in every instance were the witnesses she used “the kind of sources we would have chosen.” Lyman P. Powell, Mary Baker Eddy: A Life Size Portrait (Boston: Christian Science Publishing Society, 1950), p. 6.
↑85 Note as to what Ladd told Mrs. Glover, recorded in Asa Gilbert Eddy, diary, 1877–1878, EN003, p. 101, MBEL. Her own references in the intervening years bear out the fact that this was her understanding of her disease until she discovered Christian Science.
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