Testimony of Healing September 18, 1926 ISSUE

In 1915, my mother and I went to Chicago to consult a...

Merle Holland Dean

In 1915, my mother and I went to Chicago to consult a spine specialist who had come there from Vienna, Austria. He was to me my last hope in medicine, as I had been nine weeks in the Women's Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland, two years previously under a Johns Hopkins specialist, carrying out his treatment for one year thereafter. He told me if at the end of the year's treatment I was not healed, my trouble must be due to a curvature of the spine which I had received from a fall on roller skates in 1905. However, previous to this, ever since I was born in fact, my mother had been taking me to doctors, both great and unknown. In the beginning they all said the trouble was growing pains; but instead of diminishing as I grew, they became intensified. I could not believe that curvature of the spine was the primal cause, because I had had the aching from babyhood and the curvature came when I was fourteen. Before trying the Johns Hopkins specialist's treatment, I had taken a whole drug store of patent medicines, almost everything recommended. I had also tried osteopathy, electricity, massage, Turkish baths, physical culture, and new-thought, but all to no avail. The nervous headaches increased and the pain in my legs increased until I had nervous prostration, sagged intestines, constipation, general debility in every sense of the word. I became very bitter and agnostic, self-centered and terribly skeptical.

When my mother and I went to Chicago, after all the twenty-five years of wandering from one cure to another, we were directed to a boarding house run by a Christian Scientist. One day she saw me suffering from one of the headaches and she said, "If you would try Christian Science you would not need to suffer like that." I replied: "Please do not talk of Christian Science to me; when I have a pain I know it. I have your book, Science and Health; it was sent to me while I was in the hospital two years ago by a friend." So she went away and said nothing more.

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