Mary Baker Eddy
Mary Baker Eddy was born in 1821 and died 3 December 1910 (Wikipedia, “Mary Baker Eddy”). In February 1866, after a fall on ice in Lynn, Massachusetts, and a recovery she attributed to reading a New Testament healing account, she said she had discovered Christian Science. She self-published Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures in 1875, founded the Church of Christ, Scientist in 1879, and founded the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in 1881, where she appointed herself Professor of Metaphysics and Christian Science and charged her students $300 each for tuition. In 1870, before the College existed, she had already agreed to a partnership with her student Richard Kennedy, under which Kennedy would pay her $1,000 to teach him to heal and take patients himself, giving her half of his earnings.
eventual_status is recorded as claims_unproven, attaching to the founding promise that prayer alone — turning to God as the conscious strength of “the spirit of Truth” — can meet the approaching symptoms and incipient stages of named diseases including cancer, consumption, and smallpox (Science and Health, SH 390:27-391:6). Paul Vitello reported in The New York Times in March 2010 that the American Academy of Pediatrics, in an October 2009 letter to Senate leaders, stated there is a “complete lack of scientific evidence of the efficacy of prayer in treating any illness or disorder in children” — a reported, dated, pediatric-scoped, categorical assessment by an independent medical professional body that identifies an evidence gap, not proof of inefficacy for every condition or age Christian Science treatment addresses.