Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: Christian Science, Biblical Interpretation, and the Practice of Spiritual Healing

Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures is the foundational text of Christian Science, a work of religious metaphysics, biblical interpretation, and practical spiritual healing first published in 1875. Eddy argues that divine Mind is the ultimate reality and that sin, sickness, and death are errors to be overcome through spiritual understanding. Its style is didactic, aphoristic, and exegetical, moving between theological assertion and close readings of Genesis, Revelation, and the Gospels. Situated within nineteenth-century American religious experimentation, it also converses with debates over medicine, mesmerism, and the authority of Scripture. Mary Baker Eddy wrote from a life marked by illness, bereavement, poverty, and a decisive experience of healing that she interpreted as a recovery of primitive Christianity. As founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist, she sought not merely to propose doctrine but to establish a disciplined method of reading the Bible and practicing Christian healing. Readers interested in American religious history, women's theological authorship, or alternative modernities in medicine will find this book indispensable. It is demanding, provocative, and best approached as both scripture-centered theology and a reformist manifesto.