● ● ● and they feared she would never be well again.92 A few months later the same writer described the still more critical situation in a letter to Martha Rand Baker:
Found her very sick, from one of her most severe attacks of dispepsia, liver-complaint and nervous disease. It would be impossible to point out the changes, or trace the progress of disease down to the present time, or describe the hopes and fears, doubts and expectations that have affected us respecting the result, during this long period of continued suffering, having been all the time confined to the room and bed, except when possibly able to be helped into a carriage to ride. And what can I say of her now? How tell you, that after so long and inconceivable suffering, though still living, and perhaps doomed to yet longer and greater affliction by an all-wise but inscritable Providence, yet, that there is scarcely a ray of hope left us of her recovery. Her strength gradually fails, and all the powers of life seem yielding to the force of disease. O, Martha! it would move the sternest soul, and make mortality shrink, to witness the agony she often endures, while it pierces a sister’s heart, with a pang that only affection can feel, or can endure. . . . May [my own health] continue that I may contribute to dear Mary’s comfort while she may live, if she cannot recover.93
It is evident that the family considered her increased sufferings a justification for keeping her separated from George, rather than a result of the separation. But they did everything possible for her comfort. There was on the porch a swing in which she liked to rock, and the swinging seemed to ease her pain. For bad weather and times when she was too ill to lie outside, a sofa was fitted with rockers, and on occasion a neighboring boy, Will Lang, would be hired to rock it for hours at a time, so that “swinging Mrs. Glover” became a neighborhood phrase.94
92 Martha Baker Pilsbury to George Sullivan Baker/Martha Rand Baker, 10 August 1851, 1920.015.0013, LMC.
93 Martha Baker Pilsbury to Martha Rand Baker, 4 January 1852, 1920.015.0014, LMC.
94 This is the contraption which Milmine, Dakin, and others have described with some disingenuousness as a “cradle.” [Milmine, “Mary Baker G. Eddy,” McClure’s, p. 240; Edwin Franden Dakin, Mrs. Eddy: The Biography of a Virginal Mind (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929), p. 19.] Mrs. Eddy ironically thanked the “enterprising historians” of McClure’s for their testimony to the power of Christian Science “which they admit has snatched me from the cradle and the grave.” Mary Baker Eddy, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany (Boston: Christian Science Board of Directors, 1941), p. 315.