Christian Science doctrine of healing through prayer

The Christian Science doctrine of healing through prayer is presented as more than a preference for spiritual comfort: in Edith Mittelstadt’s case, it becomes a framework that denies illness and makes suffering appear to testify against the sufferer’s faith. The novel’s account follows that logic to its devastating conclusion: Edith rejects medical care for cancer, and ultimately understands her death not as the work of disease but as evidence of her own spiritual inadequacy.

Belief and Its Claims

In the account given to Norma Jeane Baker (Marilyn Monroe), Christian Scientists regard prayer as sufficient to heal illness. More radically, they do not accept illness as an actual condition: problems are to be addressed through prayer and through asking loved ones to pray. The doctrine therefore changes the meaning of medical evidence. Symptoms do not necessarily call for diagnosis or treatment; they can instead be interpreted within a spiritual system that refuses to grant disease independent reality.

That distinction matters in Edith Mittelstadt’s story because her condition is visible to the people around her. She has become pale and markedly thin, with dark circles under her eyes. Those who work with her urge her to see a doctor, but she refuses, insisting that she does not need one. The woman recounting the episode remembers Edith as both stubborn and brave, and believes that her fear was apparent even though Edith would not acknowledge it.

Edith Mittelstadt’s Refusal of Medical Care

Edith’s colleagues recognize that she is seriously ill before she accepts medical attention. In the month before the crisis, she loses at least twenty kilos; yet the warnings around her do not overcome her conviction that prayer is the proper response. She remains away from hospital care until her illness has become unmistakably grave. By then, she is on sick leave, and the people around her understand the danger too late. Her eventual admission to hospital is not voluntary: she has to be taken in by force.

The account identifies the disease as cancer and describes it as having consumed her down to the bones. Edith, however, never speaks the word cancer. The omission is more than a refusal to name a diagnosis: it preserves the doctrine’s premise that disease itself is not real. But the same premise also leaves no neutral explanation for what is happening to her body. When death comes, the illness is not granted responsibility; Edith believes that her faith was insufficient and that this insufficiency killed her.

The Cost of Spiritualizing Illness

The doctrine’s most painful consequence in Edith’s case is the conversion of physical suffering into personal blame. Her illness is not only left untreated for too long; it becomes, in her understanding, a measure of spiritual failure. The report emphasizes the cruelty of that reversal: the disease is denied as a cause, while the dying person is made to feel responsible for not believing well enough. The woman telling Norma Jeane the story ends in tears, underscoring that the harm reaches beyond Edith’s private conviction to those who witnessed her decline.

The novel thus depicts prayer both as a hoped-for means of healing and as a rule that can foreclose other forms of care. In Edith’s experience, faith does not simply coexist with medical treatment: reliance on prayer accompanies her refusal of a doctor and her resistance to hospitalization. The late, forced admission marks the material consequence of that refusal, while her self-accusation shows how the doctrine can shape the meaning of the outcome even after medicine is no longer avoidable.

Medical Care as a Narrative Counterpoint

The book places Edith’s story alongside the institutional treatment of Gladys Mortensen, without presenting Gladys as a follower of Christian Science. Gladys’s condition is described through psychiatric records and medical interventions: she has spent years at Norwalk State Hospital, undergone several courses of electroshock that reduced her crises, and receives intensive medication to prevent depressive and manic episodes. Her diagnosis is also disclosed to prospective adoptive parents, making clinical language consequential beyond the hospital, in Norma Jeane’s chances of being adopted.

This contrast does not make institutional treatment simple or wholly reassuring. Gladys’s life remains shaped by hospitalization, diagnosis, and medication, while Edith’s story exposes the danger of rejecting medicine in favor of prayer alone. Set beside one another, the accounts show two different ways illness is given meaning and managed: through clinical authority and treatment in Gladys’s case, and through spiritual denial that culminates in self-blame in Edith’s. The contrast clarifies the doctrine’s narrative significance without suggesting that the two women share the same beliefs or medical histories.