Who was “Mr. Clark in Lynn”?
Broad Street looking west from Beach Street, Lynn, Massachusetts, c. 1879. C.R. Cook. Courtesy of Lynn Museum and Arts Center.
Occasionally we receive questions about an undated healing that Mary Baker Eddy described on page 192 of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures:
I was called to visit Mr. Clark in Lynn, who had been confined to his bed six months with hip-disease, caused by a fall upon a wooden spike when quite a boy.1
Who was that individual?
John Curtis Clarke (c. 1835–1916)2 worked in one of the many shoe factories operating in Lynn, Massachusetts, in the 1800s. He was married to Naomi Otis Clarke (1837–1919).
The critical biography Mary Baker Eddy: The Truth and the Tradition, by Ernest Bates and John Dittemore, claimed that Clarke was not in fact healed during his encounter with Eddy:
In the basement of the Russell house John Clark, a crippled shoemaker, had his shop. Mrs. Patterson [Eddy] attempted to heal him, but without success. Later, when she claimed him as one of her cures and this was reported to Clark, the latter remarked sardonically: “I didn’t know she cured me. Have always had this same trouble and have it yet.”3
This quotation does not have a source. Neither have we found any accounts in our collections at The Mary Baker Eddy Library to corroborate what Bates and Dittemore assert here.
At the same time, a reminiscence from John Clarke’s daughter-in law indicates that “Mr. Clarke returned to his work after this healing and worked every day thereafter.”4 Grace Redman Clarke (1870–1963) was married to the Clarkes’ son John Hezekiah Clarke (1867–1912). And in 1955 she wrote a statement verifying her father-in-law’s healing, which was documented in the first edition of Science and Health, published in 1875:
Mrs. Eddy called at the house where they were living and asked if she might see Mr. Clarke.
I asked her [Naomi Otis Clarke] if she was sure that it was Mrs. Eddy and she replied that the woman said she was. At the time Mr. John C. Clarke had been in bed for eight months, the sickness being caused by a fall on a spike when he was a boy; this brought on a running sore, and when Mrs. Eddy called the Doctor was present, his verdict that there was no help for Mr. Clarke as the sore had affected the bone.
Mrs. Eddy remained in the room with the patient some time. When she came out she said that he was cured and could get up at any time that he liked. He did get up the next morning with the sore healed and feeling fine, eating breakfast with his family.
As his daughter-in-law, I never knew him to be in bed with any sickness afterward and he lived to be over eighty years of age. He passed on sitting in a chair, no one knowing of his passing until a few minutes later.5
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- Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (Boston: The Christian Science Board of Directors), 192.
- His name was sometimes spelled Clark.
- Mary Baker Eddy: The Truth and the Tradition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932), 115. An academic and author, Bates (1879–1939) taught at several colleges. A former Director of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, Dittemore (1876–1937) financed the publication of this book over a decade after he was removed from that office. On publication two years later, it received praise from some scholars and members of the press, although it was a commercial failure. The book stands alongside the biographies of Georgine Milmine (1907) and Edwin Dakin (1929) as a deeply critical portrayal of Eddy. At the same time, the access Bates had to original materials Dittemore had stolen when he left office—together with an avoidance of some excesses evident in those two earlier biographies—distinguish it.
- Grace M. Clarke, “Information Concerning John Curtis Clarke,” 29 September 1955, Reminiscence.
- Grace M. Clarke, “Verification of John C. Clarke’s Healing of Hip Disease by Mrs. Eddy,” 29 July 1955, Reminiscence. An account of Clarke’s healing is also found on pages 299–300 of Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer, Amplified Edition, by Yvonne Cache Von Fettweis and Robert Warneck. Grace Clarke’s reminiscence of the event is mentioned, as well as Eddy’s account of the healing as it appeared in the third edition of Science and Health (1881, pages 154–155).