● ● ● were recorded by those who experienced, saw, or heard about them.57 Other cases required longer treatment.58
Mrs. Glover had already learned from her experience with Ellen Pilsbury that the exuberant joy stirred in an individual by a sudden healing could sometimes change to a very different emotion if the individual felt his basic convictions too deeply challenged by what had happened. On occasion this could result in a later denial of the healing or, she warned, in an arrest of the recuperative process already begun.
This may be the explanation of the case of John C. Clarke, a young shoemaker who lived in the basement of the Reverend Philemon Russell’s house where the Pattersons had stayed for a time in 1866. A striking healing of this young man is described in Science and Health, and the incident probably occurred in the early seventies.59 Mrs. Eddy’s account implies that Clarke himself was unwilling to recognize the spiritual power by which he had been healed. Decades later he was quoted by hostile critics as saying: “I didn’t know she cured me. Have always had this same trouble and have it yet.”60 But his daughter-in-law Mrs. Grace M. Clarke wrote toward the end of her life:
My mother-in-law told me that at the time . . . Mrs. Glover, healed her husband, he had lain in bed eight months suffering from hipdisease which was caused by a fall upon a wooden spike in boyhood. . . .
Mr. Clarke returned to his work after the healing and worked every day thereafter. . . .
57 Published accounts are to be found in Clifford P. Smith, Historical Sketches from the Life of Mary Baker Eddy and the History of Christian Science (Boston: Christian Science Publishing Society, 1941), pp. 69–87; Irving C. Tomlinson, Twelve Years with Mary Baker Eddy, amplified ed. (Boston: Christian Science Publishing Society, 1994), pp. 53–78; A Century of Christian Science Healing (Boston: Christian Science Publishing Society, 1966), pp. 6–10. [See also Yvonne Caché von Fettweis and Robert Townsend Warneck, Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer, amplified ed. (Boston: Christian Science Publishing Society, 2009).]
58 In her sworn testimony in the Barry case in 1879, Mrs. Eddy stated that she had treated George Barry twice a week. [“Fed on Mind,” The Boston Daily Globe, 1 October 1879, evening edition, p. 1. Publisher’s note: The first edition states Eddy treated Barry “once a week for a year”; the source of this information has not been located.]
59 [Eddy, Science and Health, p. 192–193.]
60 Ernest Sutherland Bates and John V. Dittemore, Mary Baker Eddy: The Truth and the Tradition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932), p. 115. I have been unable to find the original source for this story.