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Houses of Healing: Sacred Space, Spiritual Practice, and the Transformation of Female Suffering in the Faith Cure Movement, 1980–90

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Heather D. Curtis
Heather D. Curtis
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

In the autumn of 1876, while attending the nation's Centennial celebration, Miss Harriet M. Barker contracted a case of typhoid fever that left her crippled. While she managed to “get about” on crutches for several years, Barker's health “was gradually failing.” By the spring of 1881, she was “completely prostrated.” For the next four years, Barker remained a “helpless invalid” whose case “seemed to baffle even the best medical skill.” Although she tried various treatments, “all remedies were of but little avail,” and her physicians eventually deemed her incurable, predicting that she had only a few months to live, at most. “During all these years of suffering,” Barker later recounted, “I prayed so earnestly for patience and resignation to God's will, and for the most part rested quietly, and, as I believed, submissively, under what I felt was His needed teaching of me.” But as “the weary years dragged on,” Barker recalled, “I began to think of the subject of Divine Healing.” At first, she reported, the possibility of healing by faith “seemed a great way off—something for only a chosen few.” Although she became “more convinced of the reality of this belief” through discussions with friends who were “deeply interested” in the possibility of faith cure, Barker confessed that she “was still much in the dark about the matter” and could not “see it clearly enough to grasp it for myself.”

Type
Forum on Sacred Spaces of Healing in Modern American Christianity
Information
Church History , Volume 75 , Issue 3 , September 2006 , pp. 598 - 611
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2006

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References

1. “Barker, Miss H. M.,” in A Cloud of Witnesses for Divine Healing, ed. Simpson, A. B., 2nd ed. (New York: Word, Work and World, 1887), 170–78Google Scholar. See also Barker, Nettie M., “Made Whole in Christ,” The Word, Work and World 5 (04 1885): 124–25.Google Scholar

2. For a fuller treatment of the divine healing or faith cure movement, see Curtis, Heather D., “The Lord for the Body: Pain, Suffering and the Practice of Divine Healing in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Protestantism” (Th.D. diss., Harvard University, 2005)Google Scholar; Baer, Jonathan R., “Perfectly Empowered Bodies: Divine Healing in Modernizing America” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2002)Google Scholar; Chappell, Paul G., “The Divine Healing Movement in America” (Ph.D. diss., Drew University, 1983)Google Scholar; Cunningham, Raymond J., “From Holiness to Healing: The Faith Cure in America, 1872–1892,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 43:4 (12 1974): 499–513CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Dayton, Donald, “The Rise of the Evangelical Healing Movement in Nineteenth-Century America,” Pneuma: Journal for the Society of Pentecostal Studies 4 (spring 1982): 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hardesty, Nancy, Faith Cure: Divine Healing in the Holiness and Pentecostal Movements (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2003)Google Scholar; and Opp, James W., The Lord for the Body: Religion, Medicine, and Protestant Faith Healing in Canada, 1880–1930 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005).Google Scholar

3. Record of the International Conference on Divine Healing and True Holiness Held at the Agricultural Hall, London,June 1 to 5, 1885(London:J. Snow and Bethshan, 1885)Google Scholar. For an overview of Protestant beliefs regarding the miraculous in the nineteenth century, see Mullin, Robert Bruce, Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), especially 9–30.Google Scholar

4. “Barker, H. M.,” in A Cloud of Witnesses, 170–78.Google Scholar

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Sentimental novels in this vein included Warner, Susan, The Wide, Wide World (1850; reprint, New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1987)Google Scholar; Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom's Cabin: or Life Among the Lowly (1852; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1981)Google Scholar; and Prentiss, Elizabeth, Stepping Heavenward (1869; reprint, Sterling, Va.: GAM, 1996)Google Scholar. Associations between true womanhood and suffering have been assiduously documented. Classic studies of the domestic ideology include Welter, Barbara, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–60,” American Quarterly 18 (summer 1966): 151–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cott, Nancy F., The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Sklar, Kathryn Kish, Catherine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Smith-Rosenberg, Caroll, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985)Google Scholar; Theriot, Nancy M., Mothers and Daughters in Nineteenth-Century America: The Biosocial Construction of Femininity, rev. ed. (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996)Google Scholar; and Tompkins, Jane, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

8. On the “cult of female invalidism,” see Stage, Sarah, Female Complaints: Lydia Pinkham and the Business of Women's Medicine (New York: W. W. Norton, 1797), 74–75Google Scholar; Verbrugge, Martha, Able-Bodied Womanhood: Personal Health and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Boston (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 16Google Scholar; and Herndl, Diane Price, Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), especially 20–30Google Scholar. Numerous historians have charted the increasing trend among nineteenth-century physicians toward focusing on the reproductive organs as the main determinants of female health. Classic studies include Smith-Rosenberg, Caroll and Rosenberg, Charles, “The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Woman and Her Role in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American History 60 (09 1973): 332–56CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Wood, Ann Douglas, “‘The Fashionable Diseases’: Women's Complaints and their Treatment in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4 (summer 1973): 25–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Stage, , Female Complaints, 64–88Google Scholar. For more recent analyses, see Braude, Ann, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2001), 142–61Google Scholar; and Satter, Beryl, Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 21–56Google Scholar. As Satter, Braude, and others have shown, even under the best of circumstances, menstruation was seen as fundamentally pathological.

9. Clarke, Edward H., Sex in Education: Or, A Fair Chance for Girls (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1873)Google Scholar. On Mitchell and the “rest cure,” see Satter, , Each Mind a Kingdom, 54–55Google Scholar; and Bassuk, Ellen L., “The Rest Cure: Repetition or Resolution of Victorian Women's Conflicts?,” in The Female Body in Western Culture, ed. Susan, Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 141–43.Google Scholar

10. Record of the International Conference, 151–63. See also Simpson, A. B., “The Conferences in Great Britain,” The Word, Work, and World 5 (09 1885): 233–40Google Scholar. Details on the establishment and development of these institutions may be found in Curtis, “Lord for the Body,” chapter 5.

11. Simpson, A. B., “The New Berachah Home,” The Word, Work, and World (09 1886): 186–87.Google Scholar

12. “Barker, H. M.,” in A Cloud of Witnesses, 170–78.Google Scholar

13. Judd, Carrie F., ”‘Faith Rest’, Buffalo, N.Y.,” Triumphs of Faith 8 (04 1884): 96Google Scholar. For this understanding of the relationship between space and ritual practice, I am indebted to Smith, Jonathan Z., To Take Place: Toward a Theory of Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)Google Scholar, especially chapter 5.

14. MrsChancey, C. E., “Healed by Power Divine,” Triumphs of Faith 8 (08 1888): 178Google Scholar; Simpson, A. B., “The New Berachah Home,” The Word, Work, and World (09 1886): 186–87Google Scholar; and Montgomery, Carrie Judd, “The Present Outlook of Our Work,” Triumphs of Faith 10 (07 1890): 147–48.Google Scholar

15. “The Rest,” Triumphs of Faith 3 (April 1883): 92–93Google Scholar; “Homes of Divine Healing,” The Word, Work and World 5 (10 1885): 253–54Google Scholar; and Judd, Carrie F., “Faith-Rest Cottage,” Triumphs of Faith 2 (04 1882): 59–60.Google Scholar

16. The “terms” that various faith homes established ranged from no charge to a nominal fee of, in several cases, one dollar. See, for example, Judd, Carrie F., “Faith-Work,” Triumphs of Faith 4 (12 1884): 265–69Google Scholar; and Daniels, W. H., ed., Dr. Cullis and His Work (1885; reprint, New York: Garland, 1985), 352Google Scholar; Judd, Carrie F., “Faith-Work Abroad: Bethshan,” Triumphs of Faith 2 (11 1882): 165–66Google Scholar; and Sloan, Kittie A., “Faith Work in Stratford” Triumphs of Faith 4 (08 1884): 185–88Google Scholar. For a critique of this financing method, see Buckley, James Monroe, “Faith-Healing and Kindred Phenomena (Supplementary Article),” The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 33 (03 1887): 781–87.Google Scholar

17. For examples of individuals who compared themselves with the woman in Mark 5, see Lancaster's, Alice testimony, in “Experiences of Physical and Spiritual Healing,” Triumphs of Faith 1 (02 1881): 30–31Google Scholar; and Elizabeth Baptist's account of her healing in MrsMix, Edward [Sarah], Faith Cures, and Answers to Prayer (1882; reprint, Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 72.Google Scholar

18. Beryl Satter discusses the rate policies of Christian Science healers in Each Mind a Kingdom, 85–86. Divine healing advocates contrasted their policies to magnetic, clairvoyant, orthodox, and Christian Science practitioners on many occasions and also confirmed that operating faith homes was not a profitable enterprise. See, for example, Judd, Carrie F., ”‘He That Receiveth You Receiveth Me,’” Triumphs of Faith 6 (11 1886): 260Google Scholar; Cullis, Charles, Faith Healing (Boston: Willard Tract Repository, n.d), 36Google Scholar; Judd, , “Faith-Work,” 265–69Google Scholar; and Prosser, Anna W., From Death to Life: An Autobiography (Buffalo, N.Y.: McGerald, 1901), 164–69.Google Scholar

19. Buckley, , “Faith-Healing and Kindred Phenomena (Supplementary Article),” 781–87.Google Scholar

20. For Bates's story, see Bates, Carrie B. to Judd, Carrie F., 22 November 1884, Triumphs of Faith 4 (12 1884): 286–88Google Scholar; Bates, Carrie B., “The Lord My Healer and Keeper,” Triumphs of Faith 2 (02 1889): 25–29Google Scholar; and Pardington, George P., Twenty-Five Wonderful Years: A Popular Sketch of the Christian and Missionary Alliance (1919; reprint, New York: Garland, 1984), 172–73.Google Scholar