Medicalizing Religion: Christian Science as a Historical Cause of Madness

At the turn of the twentieth century, hundreds of Christian Scientists, including their founder Mary Baker Eddy, were charged with insanity owing to their religion. As a new religion, Christian Science became part of the medically-sanctioned etiology of insanity at the time. Newspapers were swift to pathologize Eddy and the members of her church thus justifying their institutionalization. Their stories were manufactured into tabloid sensations that depicted Christian Scientists in a variety of denigrating frameworks such as murderer, family-disrupter, and subverter of gender roles. Superintendents of insane asylums served as expert witnesses in trials where they were utilized by both the defense and prosecution to demonstrate the scientific credibility of belief in Christian Science as a precipitator of insanity. The proposed paper examines how turn of the century American politics of religion and medical science intertwined to construct Christian Science as a cause of insanity. I draw not only from medical sources such as scientific journals and medical conference proceedings, but popular coverage of emerging tropes of madness in connection with religion. To focus my discussion, I employ historical media coverage of two trials in which Christian Scientist defendants were adjudged both sane and insane by physicians. In both of these cases, the female defendant's mental capacity was questioned owing to their religious identity. I argue that historical charges of insanity levied against members of Christian Science reveal complex tensions concerning the historical negotiation of faith within medical discourse.