since floated apart down the river of years." She charges this "mental assassin" with even darker crimes.
The husband of a lady who was the patient of this malpractitioner poured out his grief to us and said: "Dr. K—— has destroyed the happiness of my home, ruined my wife, etc."; and after that, he finished with a double crime by destroying the health of that wronged husband so that he died. We say that he did these things because we have as much evidence of it as ever we had of the existence of any sin. The symptoms and circumstances of the cases, and the diagnosis of their diseases, proved the unmistakable fact. His career of crime surpasses anything that minds in general can accept at this period. We advised him to marry a young lady whose affection he had won, but he refused; subsequently she was wedded to a nice young man, and then he alienated her affections from her husband.[1]
The real Richard Kennedy must not be confounded with the smiling Elagabalus of Mrs. Eddy's imagination. While she was perfecting her creation, the flesh-and-blood Kennedy was establishing an enviable record for uprightness, kindliness, and purity of character. In 1876 he became prosperous enough to move his office to Boston. There he was, as he had been in Lynn, an active agent for good. He had made many friends and had built up a good practice, when, in 1881, in the third edition of Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy broke forth into that tirade of invective which she called "Demonology"—the flower of nine years of torturing hatred. Kennedy's old friends in Lynn were stirred to mirth rather than indignation when a passage like the following was applied to a man whose amiability was locally proverbial:
The Nero of to-day, regaling himself through a mental method with the tortures of individuals, is repeating history, and will fall upon his own sword, and it shall pierce him through. Let him remember this when, in the dark recesses of thought, he is robbing, committing adultery, and
- ↑ Science and Health (1881), chapter vi, p. 6.
