Malinda Cramer

Malinda Cramer had been ill for most of her adult life. The accounts describe more than twenty years of invalidism, physicians who could do nothing, and a move to California in the hope that the climate would help, which it did not. In 1885, sitting alone, she put a question to herself in the plainest possible terms: is it possible for me to be well, and if it is, what is it that makes it so.

What she reported was an answer, immediate and not argued for, that God is all there is, that this presence is everywhere and is her own being, and that there is therefore nothing else for sickness to be made of. Her health improved from that point and she treated the experience as the whole of her doctrine.

The name she gave it was Divine Science, and the word science is doing the work it does throughout the movement: not laboratory method, but the claim that the principle is orderly, statable and repeatable by anybody who understands it. She opened the Home College of Divine Science in San Francisco in 1888, began the magazine Harmony, and travelled to teach.

Her most consequential organisational act was outward-facing. In 1892 she was among the founders of the International Divine Science Association, the first body to gather the separate mental healing teachers into one meeting, and it is the ancestor of the umbrella organisations that gave New Thought a collective identity rather than a scatter of independent classrooms.

Divine Science is unusual among the New Thought bodies in having no single founder, and the way it came together says something about how the whole movement worked.

Cramer arrived at her position alone in San Francisco in 1885. Some six hundred miles away, in Colorado, Nona Brooks and her sisters arrived at a closely related one within a couple of years, out of a class taught by a student of Emma Curtis Hopkins. Neither party knew of the other. When they met, at one of the association gatherings, they found the teaching substantially the same, and the Denver group adopted Cramer's name for it, so that a single tradition now had two starting points and two centres of gravity.

That pattern of independent arrival is characteristic. The ideas were circulating in classes, magazines and personal letters, and the movement's teachers regularly discovered that a formulation they had reached privately was already in use somewhere else. It is the reason a founding attribution in New Thought is nearly always contested, and it is why the atlas records Quimby as precursor rather than founder and holds the Religion-level founding relation as debated.

Cramer was caught in the San Francisco earthquake and fire of April 1906, was injured, and died in August of that year. Leadership of the tradition passed to Denver, where Nona Brooks had built an actual church, and the San Francisco work did not survive her.