Christian Science spiritual healing and rejection of medicine

Christian Science spiritual healing and rejection of medicine is a practical rule in Norma Jeane’s life, shaping how she responds to pain and illness rather than remaining an abstract creed. The narrative shows both her reliance on spiritual affirmations and the strain that arises when bodily needs and work obligations press against that commitment.

Belief in Practice

During her early marriage to Bucky Glazer, Norma Jeane refuses medication for menstrual pain, including aspirin recommended by Bucky’s mother. Bucky finds her refusal difficult to understand, but the account identifies her commitment to Christian Science as the reason she will not take medicine. Her choice makes the belief concrete: it governs an ordinary, recurring discomfort and influences how the young couple negotiate care and disagreement.

On their wedding night, when she is anxious and unsettled, Norma Jeane silently repeats affirmations that Mind alone is real, God is love, and love heals. She returns to the same assurances as the encounter continues. The repetitions function as a means of sustaining herself through an experience that differs sharply from what she had imagined; spiritual language becomes something she uses in the moment, not merely a doctrine she professes.

Pressure and Compromise

The rule is not shown as effortless or unchanging. Later, while working at the Radio Plane factory, Norma Jeane fears that menstrual pain and nausea may prevent her from keeping her job. She takes aspirin to manage the cramps, although she believes doing so is wrong and feels ashamed when she has to ask for time off. The episode places employment and financial security in direct tension with her religious practice: she takes medicine not because her belief has disappeared, but because she is trying to remain at work and preserve the position she has earned.

Her response therefore changes with circumstance. Earlier, she refuses even simple medication despite discomfort; at the factory, she makes a reluctant exception under pressure. The narrative gives the decision its conflict rather than treating it as a clean conversion or a settled rejection of her faith.

Gladys and Institutional Treatment

The account also sets Norma Jeane’s practice beside the medical treatment of her mother, Gladys Mortensen. When Norma Jeane considers visiting her after ten years apart, a doctor tells her that Gladys is near the highest level of recovery possible in her case. Hospital records describe years of electroshock treatment, which had reduced her crises, and an intensive medication regimen intended to prevent further episodes. Gladys’s psychiatric diagnosis and treatment are reported through institutional records, while the possible effect of a visit is framed as a question for the doctor.

Later, after Gladys is found confused in a church and returned to the clinic by police, Norma Jeane embraces her and weeps. This reunion does not establish that Gladys shared her daughter’s religious rule; instead, the narrative places Norma Jeane’s personal reliance on spiritual healing alongside the hospital’s management of her mother’s illness. The contrast keeps belief, diagnosis, and treatment distinct while showing how medicine and institutional care shape the family’s circumstances.

Narrative Significance

Across these episodes, Christian Science is neither presented only as a private conviction nor reduced to a simple explanation for every choice. It informs Norma Jeane’s refusal of pain relief and the affirmations she uses in distress, but the factory scene exposes the limits imposed by work and bodily suffering. Gladys’s hospitalization supplies a separate medical context, making visible the different ways mother and daughter encounter illness and care. The rule’s significance lies in this tension between spiritual discipline, practical necessity, and the treatment available to a family marked by illness.