Who were Graham and Cutter?

Sometimes patrons ask us about two men who Mary Baker Eddy referred to in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures:

Did Jesus understand the economy of man less than Graham or Cutter? Christian ideas certainly present what human theories exclude — the Principle of man’s harmony. The text, “Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die,” not only contradicts human systems, but points to the self-sustaining and eternal Truth.¹

Sylvester Graham (1794–1851) was born in Connecticut and briefly attended Amherst College in Massachusetts. He was then ordained as a Presbyterian minister and lectured widely on temperance and other social issues. Graham is most well-known for his development of the “Graham” diet and its accompanying ideas about food and health. He invented Graham bread, made of unsifted wheat flour and containing no artificial additives, as well as the Graham cracker. He also advocated a vegetarian diet. Eddy mentioned “the Graham system” on page 221 of Science and Health. For more on that passage, see our article “Was Eddy the ‘person’ who adopted the Graham system?”²

Dr. Ephraim Cutter (1832–1917) was a medical doctor. Educated at Yale, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania, he practiced in New York and Boston for 45 years. A prolific writer, he contributed to many of the medical journals of his day and was selected as a member of the committee that revised the United States Pharmacopoeia—a compendium of drug information. Eddy likely referenced Cutter because of his wide-reaching ideas about the influence of diet on health. He appears again on page 175 of Science and Health, acknowledged as having calculated “the exact amount of food the stomach could digest.”³