Article May 1, 1976 Issue

A Book Becomes the Physician

MARY RETTA TITUS

When I was little, we had a "medicine book" in our family. Most people did. It told how to make poultices and other home remedies. Its influence faded into the background as I grew up and went to a physician for physical problems.

However, after college, while taking some postgraduate work, I became friends with a young student who relied upon a totally different kind of book for her health. In fact she relied upon the truth that it taught for her whole happiness and well-being. Curious, I began to read a copy secretly, and I have never since that time been without Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy.

Soon the Bible, not very well known to me then, became my companion, too. And during the years that followed, I found a church—the Church of Christ, Scientist—that preaches and practices the spiritual law behind the healing works of Christ Jesus. A whole new world of the glory of God became mine through Science and Health, the Christian Science textbook. I could see that God is what a familiar hymn calls Him, "the Great Physician."^{Christian Science Hymnal, No. 96;} My first healing, not a physical one, was of a very bad temper that had been a curse all my life. As I read the book and learned from it something of the power of God, divine Love, over all things, this lack of self-control faded into nothingness, thus proving one of the book's statements, "Science inevitably lifts one's being higher in the scale of harmony and happiness."^{Science and Health, p. 60;}