Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures

The book's argument begins where Eddy's own account of her life turns: her recovery in 1866, after a severe fall in Lynn, Massachusetts, while reading an account of one of Jesus's healings, an experience she spent the following years working into a system. Science and Health presents that system in chapters on prayer, atonement and eucharist, marriage, spiritualism contrasted and rejected, science and theology and medicine, physiology, and the interpretation of Genesis and the Apocalypse that gives the book the second half of its title.

The core positions are stated without compromise. God is All-in-all, infinite Mind, and matter possesses no true life, substance or intelligence; the human condition described by the senses, including disease, is a misapprehension that yields to the understanding of God's allness, as shadow yields to light. Healing therefore is not miracle and not willpower but the operation of divine law, repeatable in principle by anyone, which is why Eddy called the teaching a science.

The chapter Recapitulation, arranged as questions and answers, condenses the doctrine for teaching and includes the statement of being that begins there is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. A glossary assigns spiritual senses to biblical names, and the closing chapter, Fruitage, prints firsthand accounts of readers who report recovery from long illness through study of the book alone.

The first edition of 1875 was a rough vessel by its author's own reckoning, and Eddy revised the book through several hundred printings, adding the Key to the Scriptures in 1883 and reshaping the text substantially with editorial help on matters of style, most notably from the retired clergyman James Henry Wiggin, whose role editors have documented while the church maintains, as Eddy did, that the ideas were entirely hers.

The 1907 revisions produced the text now standard. Institutionally the book is woven into the church Eddy founded in Boston in 1879 and reorganised in 1892: the Church Manual ordains that services be conducted by two Readers, one reading from the Bible and one from Science and Health, with weekly lesson-sermons composed of citations from both, so that the books themselves, not preachers, occupy the pulpit. Practitioners listed by the church treat the sick through prayer on the book's principles, and its teaching that reliance on medicine and reliance on Science pull against each other made the movement a lightning rod: deaths of untreated children brought prosecutions and public argument through the twentieth century, and the church has since emphasised that members are free to make their own medical decisions. Mark Twain's hostile Christian Science of 1907 remains the famous contemporary attack. The book has sold over ten million copies and remains in print in many languages.