● ● ●  Patterson was anxious to get her to drop the medicine and decided to try unmedicated sugar pellets, without telling her what they were. The improvement continued, except when the pellets were withheld for a day or two. The woman finally recovered.⁶⁶

This was obviously an experiment in the use of what today would be called placebos, but in Mrs. Eddy’s words in 1907 it “was a falling apple to me—it made plain to me that mind governed the whole question of her recovery.”⁶⁷ On another occasion when she was successfully treating a sick woman with a highly attenuated remedy, she sent a specimen of it to Dr. Charles T. Jackson, a prominent chemist of Boston, for analysis. He found that she had so diluted it that he could not discover a trace of the “drug,” which was nothing more than common table salt to begin with.⁶⁸ This experience was probably behind her statement in her autobiography, “One drop of the thirtieth attenuation of Natrum muriaticum, in a tumbler-full of water, and one teaspoonful of the water mixed with the faith of ages, would cure patients not affected by a larger dose.”⁶⁹

But these discoveries were also disillusioning. The hocus-pocus of attenuating the drug, shaking the new solution vigorously each time, might serve to focus thought on the process and, in a sense, substitute thought for the drug, but it reduced the whole thing to a sort of magic in which the patient’s faith was the decisive factor. With the progress of her experiments, Mrs. Patterson’s own faith in homeopathy decreased. Sometime in 1859 or 1860, when Myra Smith was with her, the girl was making up her bed one day and accidentally knocked onto the floor and broke the little bottle of pellets which she kept under her pillow, but she quickly told Myra “not to mind as they were no good—any way.”⁷⁰