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Gill's study of Eddy is not perfect. She could have placed Christian Science more accurately within the larger religious context, and in particular she might have traced the influence of New Thought, a diffuse 19th-century movement that emphasized spiritual healing. The work also comes uncomfortably close to the genre of psychobiography, with Gill speculating overly much about the motivations of her subject. At times, her undisguised admiration overcompensates for the polemical nature of most previous biographies, but she is extremely thorough with the historical record, allowing all available documents to come to light. Gill's biography will stand the test of time as the first major study to mine the considerable scholarly possibilities that exist between church-sanctioned hagiography and muckraking exposé.
The virtues of Gill's biography are perhaps best appreciated when it's read alongside Caroline Fraser's book, God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church, the most damning critique of Christian Science to appear in 90 years. The polymath Martin Gardner, who has himself authored a scathing biography of Eddy, applauded Fraser's book in The Los Angeles Times Book Review as "a skillful account of Mary Baker Eddy's deluded, discombobulated life" and "the most powerful and persuasive attack on Christian Science to have been written in this century." In a rather contradictory review, Publishers Weekly acknowledged that Fraser's study was "a rousing exposé" but also called it "an evenhanded historical analysis."
Exposé, by its very nature, is never evenhanded. Fraser's agenda is clear from the outset, in her early declaration that "Christian Science has killed and maimed and materially damaged people," including, she relates, a childhood acquaintance who died of a ruptured appendix. Fraser learned of his death while in college, and the discovery forced her to admit that she "had never seen the healings that Christian Science promised. I had heard people talk about their healings, but I had never seen anyone healed at all, not anyone in our entire church."
In the preface Fraser, an evocative and skillful writer, describes her Christian Science upbringing. She portrays her mother as "a classic fair-weather Christian Scientist" who took birth control pills and slipped Fraser orange-flavored children's aspirins when the girl felt ill. Fraser's father, however, was a stern and upright Scientist who refused to have a radio or a lifejacket on his sailboat, "because we knew we would never have an accident requiring the use of one."
Fraser's personal history is only made explicit in the book's opening pages, though her negative experiences color all of the subsequent historical sections of the book. Her analysis of Eddy relies on secondary sources; she has borrowed liberally from copious negative biographies (including the infamous "Milmine" biography that is partially attributed to Willa Cather). Indeed, Fraser acknowledges in the book's opening line that she never sought access to the church's archives in Boston to conduct original research. Her 19th-century sections show all of the marks of a prejudiced historian; for example, she appropriately criticizes Eddy's reminiscences of her early life, written more than half a century after the events in question, but then accepts wholesale the ex post facto testimonies of neighbors who claimed they had known Eddy as a child.
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