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.

I am grateful to say that the spine specialist was entirely honest with me when he told me that all he could suggest was a course of ten serum treatments (they being the vogue at that time) at one hundred and fifty dollars, but that it would be an experiment. My mother and sister said, "Take them;" but I said, "No, unless you can assure me that they will help me I will not permit my family to spend any more on medicine." He said, "I could not say that, because it would, as I have said, be an experiment." I was crying in despair, and realized that the awful headache which had come upon me was caused by disappointment and grief. Then I said to myself, The cause of this headache must be mental. Then it dawned upon me that I had tried everything else but Christian Science. When the specialist heard me speak of Christian Science he said, "I should certainly advise you to try it, because there have been many wonderful cures in my country, presumably by Christian Science."

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Testimony of Healing

Since childhood, Christian Science has been in my home,...