"Take possession of your body..."

Nineteenth-century medicine regarded women as naturally frail and prone to illness. This view, combined with the primitive and harsh treatments of the day, prompted women to seek alternative approaches.

During the period following the First Woman's Rights Convention in 1848, gentler therapies such as homeopathy, hygiene, and hydropathy became popular. These health reforms offered women physical relief and something more - responsibility, independence, and participation - the very ideals pursued by the women's movement.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton's experience provides a glimpse into the changing thought regarding woman's role in health care: rejecting her physician's prescription for her infant child, Stanton developed her own remedies. When her methods succeeded, physicians amiably acknowledged them as the product of a "mother's instinct." She tartly replied that her treatment was based on reason, not "instinct."

It was reason, coupled with a deeply spiritual outlook, that fueled Mary Baker Eddy's quest after her own health. Chronically ill from childhood, she searched alternative therapies for a relationship between thought and physical effect - a mind/body connection. At the same time, she deepened her study of the Bible for its promises of comfort and healing.

In 1866, a crisis propelled Mary Baker Eddy into new territory - to a place where faith and reason, spirituality and wellness converged.

A spinal injury, occasioned by a fall on an icy street, left her "in a very critical condition," according to an account in the Lynn Reporter.

Bedridden and alone, she opened her Bible and read accounts of Jesus' healing works. While reading, she was immediately healed. She had glimpsed something that would engage her every thought for the next 44 years.

While deeply moved by what had happened to her, Mary Baker Eddy was more interested in why it happened and how what she had uncovered might be shared. She spent the next few years studying Biblical healing and testing what she was learning by healing even "incurable" cases. She named her discovery Christian Science and began to teach it to others.

In 1875, Mary Baker Eddy published Science and Health, a book about her system of healing, later named Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. ( Read the book online at spirituality.com. )

With her book and her more systematic teaching came a teaching college, which she founded in 1881. The Massachusetts Metaphysical College taught students - both women and men - to practice healing and to teach others. Such healing practice provided for many women independence and a self-sufficient income. An auxiliary of this College in Boston continues to instruct interested students in how to teach Eddy's system of spiritual healing.