was then without a practising student—a serious disadvantage to her—and she was so angered that she conceived for Kennedy a violent hatred, from which, without the slightest provocation on his part, she suffered intensely for many years, and from which it may be justly said she still suffers. Kennedy simply changed his office, refused to discuss Mrs. Glover at all, and went on practising. His success so annoyed Mrs. Glover that she wished to repudiate him and his methods, and to do this it was necessary to repudiate what she herself had taught him. She therefore announced that she had discovered that the method of treatment which she had taught Kennedy (i.e., wetting and rubbing the patient's head) was harmful and pernicious. Mr. Wright's articles in the Lynn Transcript had apparently suggested mesmerism to her, and she now declared that Kennedy was a mesmerist and his treatment mesmerism.[1] In the first edition of Science and Health, page 193, she says:
Sooner suffer a doctor infected with smallpox to be about you than come under the treatment of one that manipulates his patients' heads, and is a traitor to science.
And on page 371:
There is but one possible way of doing wrong with a mental method of healing, and this is mesmerism, whereby the minds of the sick may be controlled with error instead of Truth. . . . For years we had tested the benefits of Truth on the body, and knew no opposite chance for doing evil through a mental method of healing until we saw it traduced by an erring student, and made the medium of error. Introducing falsehoods into the minds of the patients prevented their recovery, and the sins of the doctor was visited on the patients, many of whom died because of this. . . .
Soon after her break with Kennedy she had all her students strike out from their manuscript, "Scientific Treatise on Mortal-
- ↑ The story of the beginning and growth of Mrs. Eddy's belief in mesmerism is told in full in Chapter XII.
