Mary Baker Eddy

Writer

Name at birth: Mary Baker

After a sudden recovery from a serious injury in 1866, Mary Baker Eddy began to formulate the ideas that would lead her to form the Church of Christ, Scientist. In 1875 she published Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, detailing her thoughts on healing and the teachings of the scriptures. She chartered the Church of Christ, Scientist in 1879 in Boston, Massachusetts, where the home church of the faith (built in 1894 and called the "Mother Church") remains a major urban landmark. The best-known belief of the Christian Scientists (as they came to be called) is healing by faith, which they consider to be an affirmation that suffering is not God-created but rather a mode of human perception. Eddy published her autobiography, Retrospection and Introspection, in 1891. The church's widely-read daily newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor, was founded in 1908.

Extra credit: Eddy married George Washington Glover in 1843; he died the next year. Their only child, George Glover, was born in 1844... She was known as Mary Baker Glover when Science and Health was first published. In 1877 she married Asa Gilbert Eddy, and became known as Mary Baker Eddy... She is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There's no truth to the rumor that a telephone was installed in Eddy's tomb in case she returned to life; the story arose from a phone line that was installed temporarily for watchmen at the site.