While she had still been living with her parents, Mark Baker would sometimes take her in his arms and rock her like a child when she was suffering, and he would have the road strewn with straw and tanbark to lessen the noise of passing cartwheels.⁹⁵ In desperation he had even tried such new-fangled systems as mesmerism and homeopathy, to see if they could help her. Dr. Ladd had developed a little interest in the former; and Dr. Alpheus Morrill, who had married a cousin, Hannah Baker, opened an office in Concord in 1847 as the pioneer homeopathist in New Hampshire. But each of these systems brought only temporary relief.⁹⁶

In her autobiography Mrs. Eddy wrote, “During twenty years prior to my discovery [1866] I had been trying to trace all physical effects to a mental cause,” and in The Christian Science Journal she wrote, “As long ago as 1844 I was convinced that mortal mind produced all disease, and that the various medical theories were in no proper sense Scientific.”⁹⁷ The phrase “mortal mind” belongs to a later period, but young Mrs. Glover had every reason to doubt the adequacy of the prevalent medical theories to explain the real cause of disease.

Moreover, her early education had tended to fix before her gaze the great problem of the relation of matter to mind, as the eighteenth century had raised it for the nineteenth. A single quotation from Young’s Night Thoughts may do duty for the many passages in her early reading which could have set her questioning whether cause was to be looked for in matter or in mind:

               Who bid brute matter’s restive lump assume
               Such various forms, and gave it wings to fly?  ● ● ●