evitably draw recruits from the disssatisfied element in her own church. By the beginning of 1888 there was discord even in that inner circle of students who shared Mrs. Eddy's councils and who were in daily attendance upon her at her new house in Commonwealth Avenue. This growing unrest she attributed solely to the mesmeric influence of the mental scientists. In reality it arose from several causes.
Some of the students were disappointed in Mrs. Eddy personally; some, like Mrs. Sarah Crosse (for several years editor of the Journal), had lost faith in Mrs. Eddy after long service; some, like Mr. and Mrs. Charles A. Troupe, were displeased with the arbitrary way in which she conducted the Christian Scientists' Association; others were dissatisfied with her instruction in the obstetrical course which she had recently introduced into her college. The first class in obstetrics was a large one, and each member had paid one hundred dollars tuition. Of the six lectures which Mrs. Eddy gave them, five were devoted almost exclusively to a discussion of Malicious Animal Magnetism, and in the sixth she merely instructed them to "deny" premature birth, abnormal presentation, hemorrhage, etc.[1]
At the same time Mrs. Eddy fanned the fire of discontent by announcing that she would no longer receive students for the "normal" course who had not passed through her own
- ↑ This course in obstetrics, as taken down by a student of that first class from Mrs. Eddy's dictation, covers less than a page of letter-paper, and consists of the "denials" that the practitioner is to use at the bedside of his patient.
The practitioner is first to take up in thought the subject of premature birth, and to deny the possibility of such an occurrence in the case he is then treating.
He is to deny one by one some of the dangerous symptoms which may attend childbirth. Mrs. Eddy takes these symptoms up at random and with no consideration for their relation to each other.
It was her exceedingly informal and unsystematic treatment of her subject in her obstetrical course, as well as the fact that most of the lectures were devoted to the subject of Demonology, that caused dissatisfaction among Mrs. Eddy's students.
