at a length of five pages to describe how malicious mesmerism killed her husband, Fremont Snider. He was, she says, under the treatment of two healers whose minds were not in accord, and the thought from one confused the thought from the other, leaving him to die in the cross-fire. She was confident that if he had left the treatment of his case with her, he would have recovered. Even after a physician had pronounced him dead and had sent for the coroner, Mrs. Snider treated her husband, with some success, she says, adding that if she had had help she could even then have saved him.[1]
The history of the growth of the belief in malicious mesmerism, as one may follow it in the early files of the Journal, is interesting and illuminating. Here one sees how this doctrine, which was so singularly a temperamental product, born of a personal hatred and developed to meet personal needs and to explain personal caprices, begins to control the conduct and affections of people whose natures and obligations were very different from Mrs. Eddy's. So long as the belief in demonology was a mere personal vagary of Mrs. Eddy's, explaining her quarrels, affecting her spoons and pillows and telegrams, it was as harmless as it was amusing. But as one reads the letters from persons who ascribe the estrangement of friends and even the death of children to the ill-will of their neighbours and fellow-townsmen, one begins to feel the serious side of this doctrine. The reader must possess very great hardihood indeed if he can follow without sympathy one letter from Pierre, Dak., which recounts the story of the death of two young children under the treatment of their zealous mother.
- ↑ Fremont D. Snider died of heart-disease, December 17, 1888.
