Eddy was born in Bow, New Hampshire, in 1821, was ill for much of her early life, lost her first husband before her son was born, was separated from that son for decades, and was fifty-four when Science and Health appeared. She was treated in 1862 by Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, a Maine clockmaker and mesmerist whose mental healing practice unmistakably shaped her thinking; she credited him warmly at the time and later insisted her discovery owed him nothing, and the dispute over Quimby's manuscripts occupied critics for decades. She was also an institutional builder of the first rank: the church of 1892, the Manual of 1895, the Committees on Publication that answer press criticism, and in 1908, at eighty-seven, the Christian Science Monitor, founded after a run of hostile newspaper coverage and later the winner of seven Pulitzer Prizes. The Manual forbids members to worship her or to make her a personality of devotion.