Mary Baker Eddy's biography has been done in spades. As the American founder of a new church that had gone global by 1900, this is not unexpected. Yet unlike scholarship on its founder, scholarship on the Christian Science religion is slight. Historians of religions in America agree that Eddy's denomination has had an outsize influence on American culture and that her main book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, has been widely read. However, in the past fifty years, only one book-length study has been published seeking to interpret the emergence and meaning of the Christian Science denomination in American cultural life. The present study of Science and Health steps into this gap, approaching the history of Christian Science through the lens of what Eddy termed her religion's "textbook."

This study uses historical methods rooted in women's, American, religious, print, and book history. It is not essentially biographical, though it attends to how events in Eddy's life resulted in changes to her text and, conversely, how the attention, reception, and use her text received resulted in changes to her thought and life. Each edition of Eddy's book developed alongside its author, printers, publishers, and readers. Thus the evolving editions of Science and Health speak to the development of Christian Science as no other document or set of documents can.

I argue that Eddy's Science and Health presents a new phase of American religiosity that resonates and converses with but does not fit within existing categories. Eddy presented her book not as a second, new, or supplemental Bible, but as a revealed work interpreting the principle or science behind the healing in the Bible, which she claimed would renew and extend apostolic life today. This claim emerged, expanded, and continues to operate among a variety of cultural materials and historical domains, which helps us capture her religion's identity more precisely than previously. I ultimately contend that in Christian Science, Eddy introduced a postwar, millennialist restorationism with a revelatory rationale that both intimately interacted with its historical setting and altered its cultural landscape with a new view of Christian healing.