CHAPTER FIVE
Houses of Healing
Sacred Space, Social Geography and Gender in Divine Healing
In the autumn of 1876, while attending the nation’s centennial celebration, Miss H. 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 “was still much in the dark about the matter,” reporting that she could not “see it clearly enough to grasp it for myself.”1
On Monday, December 22, 1885, Barker left her home in Guilford, Connecticut, to travel to A. B. Simpson’s Berachah house of healing in New York City, anxious to “receive the teachings given there” and to continue her quest to “see clearly if this blessing were indeed for me.” Three days after reaching the home, Barker finally felt strong enough to leave her room. “On Friday evening,” she reminisced, “I was carried down to the parlors to attend the services … which were especially devoted to the subject of Divine Healing. I was laid upon the sofa with pillows and rugs, being then too weak to sit up for any length of time.” During the meeting, Barker heard “many clear and touching testimonies as to Christ’s power to heal.” After the service concluded, a group congregated around Barker to pray specifically for her recovery. “As the earnest, simple words of prayer went up from the hearts of the friends gathered there,” she remembered, “I then and there accepted my healing. It was as though the dear Lord Jesus stood close beside me, laying His tender loving hands upon me and bidding me ‘arise and walk,’ which I did at once in His strength, feeling that my hand was clasped in His, and He was leading and upholding me every step of the way.” In the months following her sojourn at Berachah, Barker continued to walk in the strength of Jesus. “Since my healing,” she wrote two years later, “I have been engaged in mission work in New York City, a work which requires a great amount of physical strength and endurance. I have sometimes walked five miles in my work, besides climbing many long flights of tenement house stairs, something which I could never have done in my life before, as my powers of endurance were always decidedly limited. But my strength, coming from Him, has never failed.”2
Barker’s narrative suggests that her visit to Berachah profoundly reshaped her attitude toward affliction as well as her actual experience of embodied selfhood. Prior to her sojourn at this healing home, Barker believed that quiet submission was the pathway to both physical health and spiritual holiness. Convinced that she could glorify God by resigning herself to her role as a suffering servant, Barker accepted her sickness as God’s will and viewed her body as a broken vessel incapable of accomplishing any service beyond the confines of the sickroom. From this perspective, embracing the notion that Christ, the Great Physician, desired to heal her of her diseases so that she might pursue an active mission for the advancement of his kingdom seemed both medically unsound and spiritually specious. Although she was intrigued by the promises of divine healing, Barker found it difficult dismiss the dominant cultural and theological discourses that sanctified female infirmity and demanded passive forbearance in the face of sickness and somatic distress.
By traveling to Berachah, Barker severed herself from deeply ingrained modes of believing and behaving that she had been unable to relinquish while remaining confined to her sickroom. Within the carefully constructed setting of Simpson’s house of healing—a domestic space infused with sacred associations and filled with faithful Christians who proclaimed the healing power of the Great Physician—Barker encountered “the Son of God,” the “complete Saviour,” who enabled her to disavow a devotional ethic of passive resignation, defy her doctor’s diagnoses, and act faith “in His strength.” Berachah’s parlor became the portal through which Barker “passed from death (a living death) unto life,” the site where she received “new life in Jesus” for body, mind and soul.3
Barker’s experience at Berachah illumines the vital place that faith homes occupied in the landscape of late-nineteenth-century divine healing. Although leaders like Simpson and Cullis regularly promoted divine healing during church services, and often held special sessions for healing prayer, laying on of hands, and anointing at camp meetings and faith conventions, they realized that these occasions offered only fleeting opportunities to instruct sufferers in the theology and practice of faith cure. While some who encountered the “gospel of healing” in these settings were ready to accept the message on the spot, others required more intensive and sustained training in order to embrace what Barker called “this true ‘way of life.’” Even those who heard about faith cure through friends or relatives frequently needed additional time and space to consider the claims of divine healing and to observe how people who put their faith in the Great Physician acted out their beliefs on an ongoing basis. Providing invalids like Barker with a supportive atmosphere in which to pursue such total transformation was one of the principal ways in which advocates of faith cure sought to assist the sick in their quest to be made whole. Following in the footsteps of Dorothea Trudel, one of the first teachers of faith healing to open her home to the sick, Elizabeth Baxter, William Boardman, Charles Cullis, Carrie Judd, Mary Mossman, A. B. Simpson, and many other leaders in the transatlantic movement founded “faith homes” or “houses of healing” that offered guests room, board, and an encouraging environment in which to nurture the mental convictions, bodily habits, and spiritual dispositions that made trusting God for healing and acting faith possible.4
Even as the establishment, spread, and popularity of these new institutions elucidates the significance of sacred sites for the success of the divine healing movement, controversies over the character, function, and position of healing homes within the social geography of late-nineteenth-century medical practice expose the deepening rift between faith cure and its adversaries. Debates about proper care of the sick, the use of chemical remedies and instrumental therapies, and the definition of disease reveal that competition over the right to treat suffering bodies, to educate uncertain minds, and to minister to sinful souls was intensifying in this period. By distinguishing houses of healing from hospitals, differentiating between “illness” and “injury,” and discriminating among “scriptural” and other means of treatment, faith home operators like Cullis, Simpson, and Judd aimed to deflect allegations of medical negligence or malpractice.
In their efforts to demarcate the boundaries between divine healing and clinical medicine, however, founders of faith homes were often forced to contend with the internal fissures that beleaguered the faith cure movement as a whole. Disagreements over what constituted “sickness” and which remedies ought to be employed exacerbated tensions that would eventually fracture the fragile cohesion that leaders like Cullis and Gordon strove to develop and maintain during the formative years of the divine healing movement. Rather than uniting the diverse factions that took part in faith cure, the establishment of common institutions actually aggravated frictions among participants while inciting increasingly vehement hostility from outsiders.
If the proliferation of faith homes provoked indignation among doctors who feared that ministers of divine healing were encroaching on their turf in an irresponsible manner, the appeal of these establishments also inflamed the passions of clergymen who worried about the effects of faith cure on traditional theological and social structures. Opponents of divine healing charged that faith homes and the devotional ethic taught within their walls threatened not only the health of individuals but also the tenor of family life and the integrity of Christianity. By working against the notion that resigned endurance represented the appropriate Christian response to pain and providing invalids like Barker with the time and space to put this teaching into practice, detractors such as James Buckley alleged, faith home proprietors undermined associations between true womanhood, domesticity, and submissiveness that were fundamental to the proper ordering of individual, family, church, and civilization.
Founding Faith Homes
By the time of the International Conference on Divine Healing and True Holiness in 1885, A. B. Simpson reported that approximately thirty faith homes were operating in the United States, including Cullis’s Faith Cure Home in Boston, Massachusetts; Mossman’s Faith Cottage at Ocean Grove, New Jersey; the Kemuel Home in Philadelphia run by Mrs. Sarah G. Beck; Carrie Judd’s Faith-Rest Cottage in Buffalo, New York; the House of Healing, in Brooklyn, New York, overseen by J. C. Young, who formerly served as superintendent of Cullis’s work; Simpson’s own Berachah Home in Manhattan; and several others in Massachusetts, Ohio, and Kentucky. Elizabeth Baxter identified at least five houses of healing in England in addition to Bethshan, the London institution that she had established along with the Boardmans and Charlotte Murray. In Switzerland, the “Home for Faith Healing” that Trudel had founded in the mid-1850s in Mannedorf continued to operate under the auspices of her successor, Samuel Zeller. Over the years, Mannedorf had produced several offspring, including one home at Hauptweil, run by Pastor Otto Stockmayer and Madame Malherbe, and another at Chardonnes. Representatives from Germany named at least three homes: one near Bonn, another at Cannstadt, and a third at Bad Boll, which Pastor Christoph, another pioneering practitioner of divine healing, had established many years earlier. Finally, missionaries from India reported that there was a movement underway among their colleagues “to have a Home for Divine Healing opened in the city of Bombay.”5
Although these establishments varied in size and, to a certain extent, in character, leaders of the divine healing movement emphasized their common purpose. “Each of these Homes is a precious centre of Christian influence,” Baxter remarked after visiting several of the American homes during her trip to the United States in the latter half of 1885. “From each of them everyone goes out blest in soul, if not in body. From each of them many sick ones go out healed.” As Baxter’s comments suggest, faith homes were intended to serve as sacred spaces where sufferers could separate themselves from their daily duties and diversions as well as from the prevailing presumptions of the surrounding culture—both of which presented barriers to the mental and spiritual transformation that necessarily accompanied bodily healing. Free from these influences, visitors entered into a liminal space in which they were encouraged to encounter God. “The whole aim of the work at Bethshan is that souls and bodies should be brought into contact with Jesus Himself,” declared the advertisement that the founders of that institution circulated soon after the home was established in May of 1882. Bethshan’s mission, they explained, was “to afford facilities for those who have been led of God to seek the Lord as their Healer in spirit, soul and body, that they, remaining for a short time, may attend the Meetings of Holiness and Healing, and withdrawn from their ordinary surroundings, may have time and opportunity for communion with God.”6
A. B. Simpson described Berachah Home, which was first opened on May 1, 1883, in his own home at 331 West 34th Street in Manhattan and later moved to various locations in the city as it grew and expanded, in a similar manner:
The advantages of such a home are very great. It affords to persons seeking a deeper spiritual life or divine healing, a season of entire rest, seclusion from the distractions of their ordinary life, and often from uncongenial surroundings. It brings them into an atmosphere full of fresh and simple faith and love. It brings them face to face with persons who are constantly receiving the touch of God in their souls and bodies, and whose living testimony is full of inspiration and encouragement. It brings them directly under careful and personal religious teaching from God’s word. And, above all, it is the home of God, where He has chosen to dwell, and manifest Himself to His children, and where He will meet in some way . . each of His waiting children.
Berachah Home, or “the Valley of Blessing,” was a place where “the invalid and the seeker after Divine healing” could remove themselves from their everyday circumstances and the demands of their regular routines, both of which might conspire to keep them from trusting the Great Physician, and enter into an environment that offered encouragement on multiple levels: through personal contact with believers who could testify to an experience of healing, through biblical teaching, and, most importantly, through direct encounters with God.7
In most cases, the initial impetus for the founding of faith homes came from the pressures that leaders like Cullis, Judd, Baxter, and Boardman experienced to accommodate those who traveled from a distance in order to meet these increasingly well-known teachers in person. Having heard of Cullis’s ministry and read the accounts of healing he published in Faith Cures, for example, Eliza J. Robertson of Louisville, Kentucky, “resolved … to visit Dr. Cullis” in the summer of 1879. “Though very feeble physically,” Robertson recalled, “I started on the long journey alone, trusting all the way for strength.” Upon her arrival in Boston, Robertson, like the many others who came to consult Cullis or attend his Thursday morning meeting for “those who desired to seek health by prayer,” found lodging in a local boardinghouse not far from the Beacon Hill Church. As word of Cullis’s meetings and ministry spread, pilgrims like Robertson flocked to Boston in growing numbers. Coping with the influx of invalids became a pressing problem, especially since many of the visitors had difficulty obtaining appropriate accommodations. “People … come to the city seeking board (while they receive the prayer of faith), but can find none in the city unless among adverse surroundings, discouraging to faith,” Cullis observed. In order to remedy the lack of suitable lodgings, Cullis opened a “Faith-cure House” on May 23, 1882, on his property at Grove Hall, a large estate that also housed his Home for Indigent Consumptives, a Cancer Home, an orphanage, and a church. The purpose of the Faith-cure House, his biographer W. H. Daniels later wrote, was to provide a place where the many who “came from a distance” but “were not in a state of mind to understand and grasp at once the privilege of health as well as grace in Jesus Christ … could rest and study and pray for a season.”8
Across the Atlantic, Elizabeth Baxter and William and Mary Boardman faced a similar dilemma as the weekly meetings held in the Boardman’s London home began to attract an increasing number of sufferers seeking healing. “As the Tuesday meetings in Rochester Square grew in numbers and interest,” Baxter recalled, “persons from a distance came and took lodgings in the neighborhood. These were often invalids, and again and again the thought occurred to me: ‘Why not open a house for their accommodation?’” After discussing her idea with the Boardmans, Baxter and Charlotte Murray opened Bethshan, Hebrew for “House of Rest,” in May of 1882. The house “was no sooner opened than filled.” The demand was so great, in fact, that “available rooms in other houses near enough to give their occupants the daily benefits of ‘Bethshan’ were taken,” and individuals associated with the work frequently offered to board invalids in their own homes. Eventually Charlotte Murray, who served as the “house-mother” at Bethshan, was able to purchase a larger dwelling at 10 Drayton Park, which could accommodate a greater number of guests.9
The Berachah Home moved to this location on 44th Street in New York City in 1889. Courtesy of the Christian and Missionary Alliance National Archives.
Offering hospitality within their own homes to sick persons who sought their prayers and counsel was a common practice among leading advocates of divine healing. Soon after her marvelous cure, Carrie Judd and her mother set aside two rooms in their house for the accommodation of invalids who desired to attend Judd’s weekly faith meeting and to remain overnight or for a longer time. As news of Judd’s healing reached a broader audience, more and more people sent letters requesting permission to visit her in Buffalo. “I remember that people wrote in this way, ‘May I come to you for a little time, and see this life of faith lived out?’” Judd later recorded. When housing these travelers in her own residence became too burdensome, Judd founded Faith-Rest Cottage “as a place of temporary refreshing for those who wish to know more of this life of faith.” Opened in April of 1882, the original Faith-Rest was a two-story frame cottage in Judd’s immediate neighborhood that supplied lodgings for visiting invalids. This home provided weary pilgrims with a place to lay their heads as well as the opportunity to attend the faith-meeting and “meet others of ‘like precious faith’ for their mutual strengthening in the Lord.” Coming into contact with fellow believers and hearing others testify to the healing power of the Great Physician, Judd believed, would help to foster faith that could be difficult to cultivate in everyday environments. At Faith-Rest Cottage, sick persons could answer God’s call to “Come ye apart … and rest a while,” Judd wrote. In this “place of hallowed stillness,” invalids could “sit silently at His feet and learn more effectually the lesson of living trust.”10
Faith Rest Cottage, Buffalo, New York. Courtesy of the Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center.
Guests at Judd’s faith home confirmed that separating themselves from their daily routines and from the company of individuals who greeted their faith in divine healing with skepticism was an essential step in the curative process. Although he tried to trust God for healing from his home in Reed City, Michigan, Alford H. McClellan “lost the blessing” because he was not, as he put it, “rooted and grounded in the faith.” It was only when he traveled to Buffalo and spent “several peaceful days at ‘Faith-Rest Cottage,’ learning more and more of God’s wonderful dealings with his believing children,” that McClellan was able to claim the blessing of healing for himself. Writing from his home several months later, McClellan encouraged others to seek out the supportive settings and congenial companionship that houses of healing offered. “I think invalids who can should go among God’s peculiar children, as it is a step out and away from old notions, beliefs, and friends, who ignorantly make it so hard for a trembling invalid to call in the ‘Great Physician,’” McClellan counseled. Mrs. S. J. Warner of Friend, Nebraska, also reported that the “sweet fellowship” she enjoyed during her visit to Judd’s Faith-Rest Cottage offered a welcome relief from the great “temptations” she faced elsewhere. Only this interlude, Warner suggested, enabled her to overcome the “mental depression” and physical ailments that had plagued her for twelve years.11
Creating Sacred Space
For individuals such as McClellan and Warner, physically entering into an encouraging environment where they encountered like-minded believers proved indispensable for experiencing epistemological, physical, and spiritual transformation. Although leaders like Judd insisted that healing was “in no wise restricted to time or place,” the emphasis they placed on the salutary benefits that faith homes offered to visitors helped foster a tendency to invest these venues with a special ritual significance. Journeying to a faith home, for many individuals, was akin to making a pilgrimage to a sacred shrine. Several years after Faith-Rest Cottage opened, Judd herself affirmed that “this little Home has been a sort of ‘Mecca’ for weary feet.”12
In their testimonies of healing, many former sufferers reported that traveling to healing homes seemed to have brought them into closer proximity to the spiritual realm. Upon his arrival at Mannedorf, for example, Pastor Schrenk felt compelled to remove his footwear. “My first impression, as soon as I got there, weary and sick, was this,” he later recalled, “‘Put off thy shoes from thy feet; this is holy ground.’” Crossing the threshold of Simpson’s Berachah Home in New York evoked a similar experience for Mrs. C. E. Chancey. “A sacred awe came over me as I entered the house,” she wrote. Simpson himself described Berachah as “‘none other than the house of God’ and often ‘the gate of heaven.’”13
When they passed through the doorways of these houses of healing, sufferers left behind a world of empirical explanation hostile to the doctrines of divine healing and entered a realm where faith reigned. Founders of faith homes intentionally cultivated the “hallowed associations” that many attributed to these venues. The descriptive names that leaders gave their establishments drew attention to the aims of these institutions as well as to their sacred character. Designations such as Bethshan (House of Rest), Berachah (Valley of Blessing), and Kemuel Home (the Risen and Living One), drawn directly from the Bible, lent these locations scriptural legitimacy and also served as heuristic devices that helped to shape a visitor’s anticipations of what she would experience within. At Mary E. Morehead’s Bethany Home, for example, a person might expect to meet the Jesus of the Bible who raised Lazarus from the dead in this small town outside of Bethlehem. When Dora Dudley Griffin opened her faith home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the winter of 1887, she named it “Beulah”—meaning “joined” or “married”—in the hope that the leaders of the home and all who visited there “might be indeed joined to the Lord.” Mary Mossman gave scriptural names to each of the rooms in her Faith Cottage at Ocean Grove, New Jersey, a practice that helped to direct guests’ attention to the home’s biblical foundations.14
Rituals of consecration also served to mark off faith homes as sacred spaces. Whenever they established a new house of healing, the founders conducted special ceremonies “for the purpose of uniting in dedicating it to the holy and solemn purpose for which it had been opened … and invoking the Divine blessing to rest upon the work.” On the day she took possession of Faith-Rest Cottage, for example, Carrie Judd held “informal consecration and thanksgiving services” before receiving the first guests. The ceremony consisted of a scripture reading, followed by a season of “prayer and singing” during which the building was “consecrated to the Lord and rich blessings were asked for all that might enter its doors.” After the dedication service, guests were invited to participate in a “cheerful evening meal” and then to attend the Thursday evening meeting for prayer and anointing of “those who were looking to Christ as the healer of disease of the body.” Often these consecration rituals were more formal and public in nature, including tours of the new facilities, sermons from well-known guests of honor, and even the commissioning of hymns specially composed for the occasion. In all cases, these events were designed to sanctify the places where invalids would gather to seek divine healing through prayer, laying on of hands, and anointing. Setting apart spaces for this purpose, founders of faith homes believed, helped to model the personal separation from their former pursuits that individuals desiring healing would be called upon to make when they received anointing. As Carrie Judd put it, “The wholehearted consecration of all that we have and are must necessarily precede healing.” Through rituals of dedication such as consecration services and anointing, both buildings and bodies became the property and dwelling places of God.15
Transforming bricks and mortar into domiciles of the divine also involved decoration. Drawing on longstanding cultural associations between the sacred and the domestic, faith home founders took pains to furnish their establishments, “not in any style of severe solemnity, but with reference to a home-like beauty and graceful simplicity,” believing that a comfortable and hospitable ambiance set the proper tone for welcoming guests and encouraging them to encounter Jesus “in the midst.” When Judd rented the building that would become Faith-Rest Cottage, for example, she noted that the house was “fresh and attractive with new paint, beautiful wall-paper, decorations, etc., all of which we feel to be of the Lord, that this Faith-Rest for His weary children may be ‘pleasant to the sight’ (Gen ii: 9) as well as restful in its spiritual atmosphere.” Guests at Judd’s cottage often commented on the “airy and commodious” rooms, the “neatly kept” furnishings and the “quiet and orderly manner” that characterized the dwelling. “All inmates,” Mrs. L. A. Fouke remarked, “are made to feel perfectly at home.” When Elizabeth Baxter paid a visit to Buffalo in the fall of 1885, she dubbed the Faith-Rest “a very bird’s nest,” noting its “small and cosy” rooms. “There is no stiffness or formality about this Home,” she wrote, “it is just like its name—a faith rest.”16
While not all houses of healing were as intimate and informal as Judd’s Faith-Rest, even the larger institutions, like Simpson’s Berachah Home, which eventually provided accommodation for over one hundred guests, aimed to maintain a home-like atmosphere. By highlighting the decidedly domestic, even familial character of these venues, founders indicated that their establishments were God’s abode to which guests were invited for visits, not clinical settings to which patients were admitted for treatment. At Bethshan, for example, residents called William Board-man, one of the institution’s principal leaders, “father-kin” and referred to the ever-changing community of workers and guests as an adoptive family.17
Staffing practices at faith homes reinforced the notion that these spaces served as spiritual retreats rather than as medical facilities. Proprietors of faith homes like Simpson and Cullis appointed “house-mothers” who welcomed guests and over-saw the daily operations of their facilities. Capitalizing on the cults of domesticity and true womanhood that upheld women as moral exemplars responsible for fostering faith and virtue within the context of the home, founders encouraged these “matrons” to participate in the spiritual nurture of the guests. Ellen Griffin and S. A. Lindenberger, the joint house-mothers at Berachah, were also called deaconesses, as were the various women who supervised Cullis’s Faith-cure House. In addition to managing the homes, these women ministered to the spiritual needs of the invalids who visited with what Simpson called “a mother heart.”18
Most house-mothers had themselves experienced healing through faith in the Great Physician, and passing on their confidence to ailing guests was part of their job description. When Carrie Judd appointed Helen Dawlly, who had suffered for years as a “helpless invalid” before being “wonderfully healed in answer to believing prayer” as the first matron of Faith-Rest Cottage, she rejoiced that she such would have such “a staunch fellow-helper” to whom she could “confide the domestic arrangements of the Faith-Rest household” while at the same time feeling assured that the depth of Dawlly’s “Christian experience and the sunshine of her strong faith and ready sympathy” would “strengthen and cheer the hearts of all around her.” Ruth Whitney, who served as the house-mother of Cullis’s faith home in 1885, also took the position after having been “healed by the Lord.” She and the other deaconesses who worked at the Faith-cure House cultivated a “lovely, joyous, sunshiny” mood. As one visitor to Cullis’s establishment observed, “It must not be supposed that this little circle of trusting souls (the workers in these faith homes) are living in the stilted, cloistered atmosphere so often associated with ‘the religious life.’ On the contrary, there is the heartiest good cheer among them.” This liveliness, the author implied, was a deliberate strategy for countering the suffering that guests in the home were experiencing. “The contagion of joy and peace is stronger than the contagion of sickness and pain,” he wrote, “so the former and not the latter dominates the atmosphere of the place.”19
Generous rate policies were another means through which faith home managers and matrons sought to nurture a familial and spiritual tone within their establishments. Following a model established first by George Mueller, an Englishman who founded an orphanage in 1835 without any firm financial resources in place, divine healing proponents who opened faith homes did so according to what they called the “faith principle of financing.” Rather than seeking endowments or investors, those who adopted this approach trusted God to provide for all of their monetary and material needs on a daily basis. Critical of what they considered “worldly methods devised by the church to gain money,” including “fairs, festivals, donkey shows, grab bags, broom drills, amateur theatricals, etc,” faith home proprietors claimed that prayer was the only fund-raising technique they employed. Judd’s Faith-Rest Cottage, for example, “was commenced in utter dependence upon the Lord for its means of support.” Extending this financing philosophy to the daily operations of their facilities, most faith home managers and matrons refused to establish set rates for room and board. In the majority of cases, guests were invited to stay at houses of healing free of charge, or for a nominal fee of a dollar a day at most. Rather than requiring payment, faith home operators suggested that visitors make voluntary contributions, or “free-will offerings” to the cause as they were able and as led by the Lord.20
While some detractors criticized this policy as a not-so-subtle form of extortion, proprietors insisted that this flexible approach preserved important freedoms. Judd explained that these munificent terms enabled her to maintain a welcoming and open environment for all guests, regardless of their ability to pay. “We have not at any time felt at liberty to name a sum for board,” she wrote, “as we desired that all who came, poor as well as rich, should feel that they were partaking of the Lord’s own hospitality, given ‘without grudging.’” Visitors at Judd’s Faith-Rest Cottage affirmed that this generosity put them at ease and made them feel at home. As one guest put it, “No one has ever been asked for means to support [Faith-Rest Cottage], but its guests have been welcomed most cordially, to its quiet and peaceful atmosphere, unfettered by the thought of remuneration.”21
In addition to nurturing a hospitable ambiance, inviting guests to stay at no cost also helped to differentiate divine healing from other forms of treatment in which the sick were asked to render fees for service. Leaders of the divine healing movement insisted that the Great Physician offered healing free of charge. Unlike medical doctors, who often bled their patients dry both physically and financially, God promised healing to all who asked without demanding monetary compensation of any kind. This freedom from financial obligation made divine healing extremely appealing to invalids who had spent many years and vast sums of money seeking relief from their ailments. In their narratives of healing, many individuals compared themselves to the woman mentioned in Mark 5:26, who “had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse.” For those who had depleted their savings in search of health, faith homes offered a kind of last resort where the “balm of Gilead” was available to all who asked at no expense.22
Maintaining a financing scheme based on free-will offerings rather than fixed fees also underscored the distinctions between divine healing, on the one hand, and Spiritualism and Christian Science on the other. Whereas clairvoyant physicians and Christian Science practitioners routinely and unapologetically charged for treatments, proponents of divine healing always asserted that receiving remuneration for serving as instruments or channels of God’s curative power and hospitality was entirely inappropriate. Praying for the sick was a privilege, leaders like Cullis argued, not a means for making a living. “I never charged a person a dollar in my life for praying for them,” Cullis maintained. If anything, Cullis’s participation in the divine healing movement had been costly, not lucrative: “I have lost many thousands of dollars by it; never made a cent by it,” he observed. Indeed, faith homes were far from profitable ventures. Voluntary contributions rarely covered operating expenses, and many establishments faced ongoing struggles to stay solvent during periods of prolonged financial hardship. Despite these fiscal difficulties, proponents of divine healing defended the “faith principle” of financing as a central feature of their work. Depending on God for their daily bread forced those who managed houses of healing to remain humble and protected them from the temptations of pride and avarice that, in their view, plagued so many of their contemporaries in competing healing movements. Furthermore, they surmised, since God was the source of any and all pecuniary aid, faith homes could be counted as sacred spaces, upheld and maintained by divine mandate and free from the taint of worldliness.23
Concerns for cultivating a spiritual atmosphere of freedom in which guests were at liberty to seek a cure without counting the cost and to pursue healing unfettered by the pressures and constraints of their customary obligations also helped to shape the daily rituals and rhythms that characterized the faith home environment. Unlike the rigorous dietary, hygienic, and exercise regimens to which inmates at many health reform institutes were expected to adhere, routines at most healing homes remained fairly flexible. After spending time at Faith-Rest Cottage following a long sojourn at a Pennsylvania hydropathic establishment, Libbie Osborn contrasted the liberty she experienced at Judd’s faith home to the highly structured schedule she had encountered at “the Cure.” “They were blessed, happy days that followed in your Home, days of growth in grace and in knowledge of God and His ways,” Osborn wrote. “It was bliss to go and come, to ride and walk, to read and write, all I liked.” Meals at Judd’s house of healing also differed from those served at most health reform institutions. Noting that many people who came “to the Home after having been at Sanitariums … would bring their little bags of Graham flour … or sometimes little gems baked without leaven,” Judd encouraged visitors to break their strict diets and “to trust the Lord and eat what we have on the table,” including the dessert.24
Other than mealtimes, weekly prayer meetings and Bible readings were the only regularly scheduled activities at Faith-Rest Cottage. On Tuesday afternoons, guests were invited to spend an hour examining scripture, and on Thursday evenings, visitors could join with a group of regular attendees to pray for “physical as well as spiritual healing from Christ, the ‘Great Physician.’” Judd also encouraged readers of her journal as well as sick persons who wrote to her requesting prayer to participate in the Thursday faith meeting by “remembering the hour with us”—thus incorporating her guests within a wider sacred community that extended beyond the walls of her house to include “believers who are separated from us by distance.” By taking part in these gatherings, guests learned that they belonged to a broader fellowship of Christians who supported them in their efforts to claim healing and act faith and who would continue to join with them “around one common Mercy seat” every Thursday evening, long after they left the nurturing environment of Faith-Rest Cottage.25
Some houses of healing held more frequent gatherings for prayer and study, infusing every day with activities that helped highlight the homes’ spiritual purpose. In addition to conducting “regular meetings” on Wednesdays and Sundays, Bethshan’s leaders also led daily services of morning and evening worship. At Simpson’s Berachah Home, “religious services” were held every morning at 8:30, and every afternoon at 3:00, except on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, when guests were invited to participate in larger gatherings at Simpson’s church. In addition, Simpson held a reception for “religious conversation” on Mondays and Thursdays from 12 to 2. Sarah Beck and her associates organized meetings for “prayer and scriptural instruction” at Kemuel Home five afternoons a week and encouraged visitors to attend the nightly revival services at the nearby Gospel Tabernacle. On Wednesday afternoons, the Gospel Tabernacle held a meeting for “the deepening of the spiritual life and divine healing” that was followed by an anointing service back at the faith home. At gatherings like these, guests had the opportunity to hear testimonies from “consecrated Christian workers who have experienced for themselves God’s energizing, healing power in soul and body” as well as to receive prayer, laying on of hands, and anointing for their own afflictions. For many sufferers, participating in these meetings proved essential for experiencing healing. Within a few hours of entering Judd’s Faith-Rest Cottage, the Rev. J. A. Ivison overcame his initial skepticism that he and his wife would derive any benefit by their visit. “My judgment became fully convinced of the glorious possibility of obtaining any blessing that we needed, spiritual or physical in answer to the prayer of faith,” he wrote. It was not until Ivison attended the weekly meeting for “the sick and heavy laden,” however, that he experienced the blessing he sought. “While enjoying the prayer service in ‘Faith Sanctuary’ on Thursday evening,” Ivison recalled, “the Lord honored the faith of the dear friends present, the faith of others at a distance who were remembering the service in prayer and my own faith, so as to fill my soul gloriously with His Spirit, and to heal my body of heart disease and rheumatism of nine years’ standing.” For Ivison, as for H. M. Barker, gathering in the presence of believers who could witness to the reality of divine healing within the sacred space of a faith home prompted experiences of God’s power that made claiming healing and acting faith possible.26
Sacred Sites or Clinical Settings?
By cultivating the sacred associations that marked faith homes as holy spaces, incorporated seekers within spiritual communities, and brought sufferers into the presence of the Great Physician, leaders of the faith cure movement also endeavored to differentiate houses of healing from hospitals. In a period of rising medical regulation, establishing this distinction was crucial to the survival of institutions like Faith-Rest Cottage, Berachah, and Bethshan. Houses of healing occupied a rather precarious position within the context of late-nineteenth-century therapeutic practice, as physicians increasingly asserted their authority as professional healers and the site of medical care shifted from the domestic sphere to the institutional realm. From the movement’s earliest days, critics of divine healing had raised grievances against faith homes, charging that these establishments failed to conform to laws governing medical institutions. In 1861 a doctor in Mannedorf entered a complaint against Dorothea Trudel and sought to shut down her home. Although the charges were dismissed on the grounds that Trudel’s “institution was carried on quite differently to any other, employing no medicine, and having as a primary object benefit to the souls of the patients,” the threat of similar lawsuits continued to plague the divine healing movement.27
In order to rebuff such attacks, Trudel and other founders of faith homes insisted that houses of healing were never designed to serve as medical facilities. As Baxter and the Boardmans put it, “Bethshan is no hospital, but rather a nursery for faith.” Unlike hospitals, faith homes focused attention on spiritual as well as physical healing. Care for the soul was an indispensable aspect of bodily health. Furthermore, the treatments recommended for guests at houses of healing did not involve medicinal therapies of any sort. With the exception of Charles Cullis, those who established and ran faith homes were not doctors or nurses. They did not dispense drugs or perform surgeries. Although Simpson’s Berachah Home did employ Dr. Amelia Barnett of the Women’s College of Medicine in New York City as a “consultant” for many years, Barnett herself was a believer in divine healing and encouraged the guests at Berachah, as well as patients in her own private practice, to put their faith in the means prescribed by the Great Physician: prayer, laying on of hands, and anointing.28
Ironically, by emphasizing their reliance on spiritual remedies rather than chemical therapeutics or other forms of medical treatment, faith-home operators and proponents of divine healing in general incited the ire of another class of physicians and theologians who interpreted their exclusive use of scriptural means as a dangerous form of fanaticism. Commenting on the 1885 International Conference held at Bethshan, physician Walter Moxon accused divine healing advocates of trespassing on territory that belonged to the medical profession. “Sickness is too serious to be trifled with by fanatics,” he wrote in London’s Contemporary Review. By meddling in matters best left to physicians, Moxon complained, the proprietors of Bethshan discouraged people from seeking proper medical care. “In this direction the faith-healing movement approaches criminality. It is persuasion to suicide.”29
Theologian Luther T. Townsend made similar allegations in a series of sermons and addresses he published as a pamphlet in 1885. Lumping together the “ignorant quack, the pretentious mind-curer,” and “the fanatical prayer-healer,” Townsend asserted that such practitioners ought to be charged with malpractice and subject to criminal prosecution for treating cases that required surgery or other medical remediation. Noting the increasing legal statutes that policed the regular practice of medicine, Townsend asked, “Why should there not be protection by law against the practice of medicine by those who know comparatively nothing of the science and art of medicine. At least, there should be a vigorous prosecution of religious as well as all other fanatics, pretenders, and quacks if criminally careless, or if neglectful of proper remedial agencies.”30
Townsend was especially critical of parents who refused to seek medical treatment for their children because they believed in the power of prayer alone to heal. To entrust a sick or injured child “to some faith-healer whose practice is based upon the theory that all visible agencies, including surgical skill and medicines, should give place entirely to invisible and supernatural agencies,” Townsend contended, contradicted “common-sense.” Instead, he insisted that parents ought to employ all means available, including “surgical instruments and the prescription of drugs;” “mental influences of the right sort” that would help to cheer, divert, and entertain a child’s mind; and “the therapeutics of religion” such as united prayer for healing, to aid their ailing children. Only by taking such a multifaceted approach could parents avoid regret, reproach, and even legal action should a child fail to recover. If a child died as the result of a parent’s failure to employ medical aid, Townsend argued, the parent “would be guilty of criminal carelessness and neglect.”31
Indeed, the issue of parental negligence prompted some of the earliest legal challenges to divine healing in the United States. In June of 1884, the New York Times reported that the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC) had issued a summons against the Reverend Clement T. Blanchett, an Episcopal minister on furlough from his missionary post in Tokyo, for failing to seek proper medical attention for his six-year-old daughter Annie. Having learned of divine healing from Arthur Sloan, a fellow Episcopal clergyman who had resigned his parish ministry in order to establish and operate a faith home in Stratford, Connecti cut, Blanchett and his wife “refused to summon a physician” after their daughter fractured her limb while playing with a companion. When the neighbors heard about the accident and the course the parents were pursuing, they tried to persuade the Blanchetts to reconsider, but they refused. Eventually, the local assistant bishop and a representative from the SPCC got wind of the situation and urged Blanchett to call a surgeon for his daughter or suffer disciplinary and legal consequences. Blanchett relented, and the charges that the SPCC had filed against him were dropped. In his treatise, Townsend mentioned a similar case of an Episcopal minister who was arrested in the summer of 1884 “for refusing to call a surgeon to set the arm of his boy, the clergyman believing that faith and prayer alone were sufficient.”32
Cases such as these proved troublesome for leaders of the divine healing movement like Cullis, who were striving to carve out a territory for themselves and their institutions that did not infringe on the province or privileges of the medical profession but also avoided accusations of fanaticism. After reading Townsend’s work when it was first published in the Boston Methodist magazine Zion’s Herald, Cullis protested that Townsend had misrepresented his position with regard to the treatment of broken limbs. “In no place in God’s word is there a promise that we may pray over a broken bone and anoint the sufferer with oil; only the sick,” Cullis stated. “A broken bone is not sickness and should be put into the hands of a surgeon.” Dr. Daniel Steele, an outspoken Holiness advocate and long-time supporter of Cullis who worked alongside Townsend as a professor of theology at Boston University, also objected to Townsend’s characterization of Cullis and his work. “Dr. Cullis has repeatedly and publicly … disclaimed all attempts by the prayer of faith to secure from God the restoration of an amputated hand or the setting of a broken limb. It is his theory that these are not included in the directions given in James v. 14, 15: ‘The prayer of faith shall heal the sick.’ Dr. Cullis does not include broken bones under the term ‘sickness’ or ‘disease.’”33
By limiting the definition of “disease” to certain kinds of conditions, Cullis, Steele, and others attempted to navigate the divine healing movement through the treacherous terrain that lay between fanaticism and skepticism. Careful to affirm that the God was able to knit broken bones together, Cullis also insisted that humans had no right to call on God to act in this way without seeking appropriate medical assistance. “I do not believe in any way you can put it that we are to lose our common-sense in this matter,” he wrote.34
Unfortunately for Cullis and his like-minded colleagues, some individuals failed to discriminate between injuries and illnesses, assuming instead that all ailments ought to be entrusted solely to the care of the Great Physician without recourse to human aid. Critics such as Townsend rightly observed the inconsistencies among participants in the divine healing movement, noting that “‘faith-workers’ are not agreed as to what are, in case of sickness, the real and possible triumphs of faith and prayer.” Even if Cullis held that amputations and broken bones could not be defined as “sickness” and therefore fell outside the scope of God’s promises to heal disease, Townsend pointed out that others, like the Episcopal minister who failed to call in a physician to treat his son’s broken limb and even prominent leaders like William Boardman, did not exclude these complaints “from the power of faith and prayer.” Indeed, Townsend noted, Boardman had included “a remarkable instance of the healing of a fractured arm” in his seminal work, The Great Physician (1881), a text that Cullis himself had published through the Willard Tract Repository. Cullis later commented that this case, which involved a young child, was the only one “which I know, personally, of a broken bone being healed” and that it did not represent a norm to which others ought to conform. Despite these qualifications, the inclusion of the story within Boardman’s definitional text did inspire some individuals, like the Blanchetts, to assume that fractures and other accidental injuries ought to be treated by God alone.35
Disagreements and debates about the boundaries of God’s promises of healing and the appropriate method of treatment for various complaints continued to plague the faith cure movement and to stymie the efforts of some leaders to chart what they saw as a moderate course between extremes. In addition to disputing what conditions counted as “sickness,” participants in divine healing also failed to reach consensus about the use of remedies for those who suffered from ailments that clearly fell within the category of “disease.” Working to offset the claims of detractors who charged them with negligence and malpractice for persuading their followers to forego necessary medical treatments, some members of the divine healing movement maintained that they did not encourage sick persons to give up their remedies or shun their physicians. Cullis, a homeopathic doctor himself, insisted that he “did not ask people to dispense with medicine.” In the preface to the first volume of Faith Cures, published in 1879, Cullis insisted that “in summing up a report of these cases, I do not in any wise wish to detract from the valuable services of the medical profession, of which I am a member.”36
To critics who complained that he prevented petitioners from pursuing essential medical interventions, Cullis replied that most who came to him seeking healing from the Great Physician had already consulted countless doctors and experimented with remedies of all sorts to no avail. “The people who are healed are, in ninety cases out of a hundred, the desperate cases that nothing can be done with by the medical men,” he reported. Indeed, in the testimonies of healing that Cullis compiled, many explained that their physicians had deemed them “incurable” and had given up their cases. For many sufferers, seeking divine healing at a faith home was a last resort. Only after finding all other options wanting did they turn to God for help. As one observer of Dorothea Trudel’s ministry put it, “Most of her patients are such as have already spent all their substance on physicians, and are nothing better, but have rather grown worse; and they often come to her much too late. It is no wonder if, after waiting for years in vain for a cure, the patient at last tries any plan by which he may even hope to be healed.” Even in these cases, however, Trudel did not attempt to discourage her guests from taking drugs or following the instructions of their doctors. “If she never used medicinal means herself,” her biographer reported, “neither did she forbid anyone to use the prescriptions of a licensed physician.” Trudel even allowed guests at Mannedorf to “be attended by their own physicians if they wish.”37
Defenders of divine healing insisted that Trudel’s attitude toward physicians and her practice of neither prescribing nor prohibiting remedies set the standard for the movement. In a response to James Buckley’s disparaging critique of faith healing in the Century Magazine, R. K. Carter explained that while “faith-healers” always employed “the scriptural means” of laying on of hands, anointing, and prayer, they also believed in “occasional leadings of the Spirit to employ other means.” Furthermore, Carter claimed, “No one is advised by any prominent leader or teacher to lay aside all medicines, unless he can do so with perfect spontaneity. Forced abstinence is will-power, not faith.”38
Although intended to deflect the condemnations of critics who called proponents of divine healing irresponsible fanatics, Carter’s comments actually reveal the ambivalence that characterized his stance toward medical therapeutics. While he did not despise doctors or drugs, he did not hold physicians or their remedies in high regard. In Carter’s view, the biblical means sanctioned by God occupied a much more honored position than any prescription that a doctor could order. Moreover, while he admitted that “other means” besides the laying on of hands, anointing, and prayer might sometimes be called for, he implied that their efficacy rarely equaled that of the divinely appointed methods laid down in scripture.
Carter was not the only one who established a hierarchy that elevated “scriptural means” over medical remedies. Most prominent leaders of the divine healing movement, in fact, shared Carter’s assessment of the relative value and appropriate uses of these two distinct approaches to healing. In his reply to a denunciatory article by the Reverend A. F. Schauffler that condemned leaders of the divine healing movement for teaching that the “use of any means other than that of anointing or prayer is sinful,” A. B. Simpson asserted that he and his colleagues understood medicine to be “a natural means of healing”—useful to a certain extent, but not the best or most efficacious approach to curing disease. While tonics and palliatives prescribed by physicians might be somewhat helpful, these were not the ideal. “Jesus,” Simpson insisted, “has provided a better way. The one may be ‘a good gift,’ but the other is ‘a perfect gift.’”39
Critics of Simpson’s position countered that “natural means” were also divinely appointed and should not be devalued in comparison with prayer and anointing. “It is God Himself who has provided all the remedies we now use for the body,” wrote British physician Alfred T. Schofield in his work A Study of Faith-Healing. Quoting from Aurelius Gliddon’s Faith Cures; Their History and Mystery, Schofield affirmed that “the Divine Healer is constantly healing through the operation of the forces which He has impressed upon Nature, and in complete harmony with what is know as natural law. Just as He answers our prayers for daily bread through natural channels, so He answers our prayers for bodily healing through the same media.” In an address entitled “The Prayer and the Prayer Cure,” Presbyterian theologian Archibald Alexander Hodge, who succeeded his father Charles as president of Princeton Seminary in 1878, chastised proponents of divine healing for “praying while refusing to use properly God’s appointed means.”40
Although they agreed that God had provided certain “natural remedies” and admitted that these means “may go a certain length and possess a limited value in relieving and healing the body,” leaders like Simpson maintained that medicines were “limited and extremely uncertain.” Furthermore, Simpson argued, the vast assortment of competing medical therapies available in this period complicated the question of which treatments God had ordained. How was an individual to determine “just what were the means that God had prescribed, whether the allopathic, or the homeopathic, or the eclectic, or the electric, or a host besides,” Simpson wondered, when these various approaches “differ among themselves in the most radical manner, and even declared each other’s principles to be essentially false.”41
Rather than trying to sort through this baffling array of options, Simpson suggested that sufferers turn to the Bible, where God had clearly described the appointed means for healing. “How much more simple is the real prescription of Scripture,” Simpson affirmed. Individuals who chose this path could also be assured that they availed themselves of the best possible course of treatment—foregoing the merely “natural” for the “supernatural,” opting for “the best God can do” rather than “the best man can do.” “He would be a fool,” Simpson insisted, “who should take the less instead of the greater.” As Carrie Judd put it, “If I rely on medicine, I limit myself to the natural efficacy of medicine; if, however I have faith to cast aside these remedies … and obey the instructions in James v: 14, 15, I do not oppose natural laws, but get beyond and above them into the infinite resources of an Almighty Creator.”42
Eschewing medicine in favor of biblical means, Judd implied, was not only the more certain path to health but also a way for individuals to act out their faith. “If I really have faith to accept the promises of healing in James v: 14, 15,” Judd wrote, “I shall consider medicine superfluous (to say the least), and my giving it up will be an evidence of my faith.” Doctors and drugs were good and acceptable for those who could not trust in the Great Physician, but for believers there was a better way. “Medicine,” Judd wrote, “may be good enough for the world, but not for God’s children.” Echoing this sentiment, Simpson argued that “natural remedies … are not His way for His children.” Even Cullis, who took such great pains to affirm his support for the medical profession, claimed that believers who relied on prayer alone chose the best course. “Don’t mistake me and say I don’t believe in physicians, God bless them, I do,” he remarked. “But let the world have doctors and Christians the Great Physician.”43
Most leaders of the divine healing movement, including Cullis, Carter, and Simpson, encouraged sufferers not to give up their physicians or abstain from medical treatment unless they could do so with full confidence and conviction. “If you haven’t got faith in God as a Divine Healer,” proclaimed the Reverend Charles Ryder, a minister from Providence, Rhode Island, who worked closely with Judd and Simpson during the 1880s, “it is your religious duty to get a physician, for your body is a very sacred thing.” Others, however, were less cautious in their approach to the matter. Some, like Judd’s associate Frederick Seely, insisted that because “medicine has no place in the healing economy of Jesus Christ,” Christians had an obligation to abstain from all means other than “the power of the Holy Spirit.” Drugs and doctors “may be used by unbelievers,” Seely reasoned, “but not lawfully or loyally by a person who has passed through the new birth.”44
Those who adopted more forceful positions like Seely’s played right into the hands of detractors who painted proponents of divine healing as dangerous extremists. Not only did these individuals wrongfully distinguish between “divine” and “natural” means, critics charged, they also made refraining from medicine a mark or requirement of true faith. In a Methodist Review article written in response to a divine healing conference held in Chicago in December of 1885, George Milton Hammell complained that “the fanatic-spirit exhibits itself throughout the entire procedure in the reiterated insinuation that professing Christians are but sinners and infidels unless they banish physic and physicians from the sick-room, and use only faith internally and oil externally.” Rather than liberating sufferers from sickness, this approach threatened both the spiritual and physical health of individuals who adopted it. Those who believed that they had sufficient faith to give up remedies, critics charged, ran the risk of exercising a kind of spiritual pride. Detractors also called attention to the physical dangers that resulted from the practice of presumption. At a meeting of Baptist ministers in New York City, for example, the Reverend H. B. Montgomery of the Willoughby Avenue Church in Brooklyn reported that the “head of the faith cure institution” in that city agreed to “cure” one of Willoughby’s former parishioners “if she would give up her physician and all other earthly means.” “She did it,” Willoughby stated, “and she was dead in three days.”45
Stories such as these continually challenged advocates of divine healing to defend the orthodoxy of their teachings, the integrity of their institutions, and the credibility of their movement in general. While some leaders attempted to maintain a moderate course that emphasized the inherent, if partial, value of natural remedies, others took a more aggressive approach. Rather than remaining on the defensive, proponents of faith cure like Elizabeth Baxter argued that doctoring and drug-taking often did more harm than good. A person who pursued health through these means was at greater risk of suffering long-term and even deadly consequences than the believer who sought healing through prayer alone. Citing the heroic therapies that caused excruciating pain and “mercurial medicines” that “affected persons and made them ill for life,” Baxter maintained that forgoing these prescriptions in favor of “a way of healing” in which “there was nothing hurtful or painful” was a matter of common sense, not fanaticism. Jesus, Baxter asserted, healed “tenderly… . He did not take the knife and cut off the cancer; but He spoke the word and that was enough. When healing the foot and ankle, He did not turn and twist the bones in different ways, until He thrilled the poor patient with such pains that he screamed, but He made the lame to walk, O, so wondrously, by His Word.” Faced with the prospect of painful therapies that might cause permanent physical damage, what reasonable person would not choose a course of treatment that required no torturous manipulations and threatened no bodily harm?46
From this perspective, divine healing provided a healthy alternative to the injurious prescriptions of the regular physicians. Even Simpson sometimes highlighted the harmful effects of “human remedies.” Quoting from a number of medical authorities, Simpson underscored the limitations of the medical profession, and especially the dangers of chemical therapeutics. In the view of one Professor Jamison, Simpson noted, “giving drugs to subdue disease, to eradicate it, is simply to kill vitality. Such, under all conditions, is the inevitable result of giving medicines—which are drugs, poisons, impurities.”47
For many individuals, forgoing medicines also represented a bid for freedom from crippling addictions. The literature of the divine healing movement abounds with stories of people whose struggles with illness spiraled into dependencies on narcotic medicines such as opium, laudanum, and morphine, all of which were popular and widely prescribed in this period. Maggie Mitchell, of Chicago, Illinois, recalled that she began taking opium ten years earlier “by the advice of my physician, to quiet pain” and “to keep up my strength.” Soon “the habit” grew so strong that Mitchell would ask strangers to get her the drugs without her doctor’s knowledge. Finally, in desperation, Mitchell prayed for God to help. Believing that God had heard her prayer, Mitchell vowed, “I will never take the vile stuff any more while I live, with God’s help.”48
In her testimony of healing, Mrs. J. K. Brinkerhoff of Norfolk, New York, confessed that she was “kept alive by morphine” and took “a great deal” of it in order to alleviate the painful symptoms of catarrh of the stomach, nervous prostration, and constriction of the spine. Although her friends and family had conspired to wean her gradually from the morphine, their attempts failed. Only when Brinker-hoff heard about divine healing did she begin to consider giving up the drug on her own. “Upon reflection,” she recalled, “I felt that I was not trusting God very much, asking for His aid and as soon as hard pain came to resort to my morphine.” Promising God that she would “never touch it again,” Brinkerhoff commenced a period of excruciating trial in which she experienced “fluttering and palpitation of the heart,” insomnia, loss of appetite, and extreme thirst. Many of her friends expected her to die or that she “would be insane by the sudden disuse of morphine” after thirteen years of steady dependency upon the drug. Writing her testimony a year and a half later, Brinkerhoff related that she had “taken no more morphine or medicine of any kind” since her decision to trust the Great Physician. “I have mentioned particularly my experience with morphine,” she recounted, “to help the reader to realize my utter inability to do without it unless aided by Divine strength.”49
Mrs. J. C. Barrett described herself as “a complete slave to one of the most dreadful forms of opium, viz.: paregoric.” Less than a month after a physician in Morristown, New Jersey, prescribed a half-ounce dose of the medication for pain, Barrett was taking “three ounces at a dose, two or three times daily.” “At the expiration of two months,” she wrote, “I knew I was a slave to its terrible use; and all a human being could do to stop it I did.” After several serious efforts to break the habit, all of which were followed by relapses that led to escalating drug use, Barrett, a practicing Catholic, met A. B. Simpson and confessed to her “dreadful opium habit.” After Simpson prayed on her behalf, Barrett rose from her knees “perfectly satisfied that God had heard and answered my prayer, and from that moment … all desire and bad effect of paregoric gone.”50
Although some were able to overcome their craving for medicines such as morphine through prayer alone, others found the force of habit too strong to break on their own. For these individuals, faith homes provided supportive spaces in which to conquer their addictions. When Mrs. T. L. Mansfield of Glasgow, Kentucky, heard that there was a “prayer-cure” at Sister Midkiff’s “Pink Cottage,” a faith home in her own state, she determined to travel there to seek release from her “nervous suffering” and from her longstanding dependency on morphine. Although she had come “to believe that God alone could cure” her from these ailments several months before, she “did not then know how to trust Him” and failed to receive the relief she sought. After spending a short time at the Pink Cottage, however, Mansfield quickly found the confidence to pray for the healing of her soul and body, and “willingly gave up all medicines and earthly physicians.” “I even gave up the morphine which I thought I could not live without,” Mansfield recounted, “and praise the Lord I haven’t wanted any of it.”51
For women like Mansfield, Barrett, Brinkerhoff, and Mitchell, and for many others who suffered similar addictions to narcotics, eschewing remedies made good medical sense. By relying solely on God for healing, they gained both relief from their diseases and release from the chemical dependencies that had caused them so much added suffering. Ridding their bodies of drugs also represented a kind of spiritual cleansing. For the Christian, proponents of faith cure maintained, protecting the body from insidious substances was not just a matter of maintaining personal health but a religious duty. By giving up chemical remedies, a person engaged in an act of purification that benefited both body and soul. Free from polluting substances, the flesh was now ready to receive the Holy Spirit through the ceremony of anointing and to become the temple of God. In this view, divine healing marked out a path toward greater holiness as well as better health.
Faith Homes and the Transformation of Female Suffering
While individuals such as Mrs. T. L. Mansfield expressed gratitude for the supportive environments and encouraging communities they found at faith homes, opponents of divine healing were troubled by the influence these establishments seemed to exercise over their guests. Detractors like James Buckley worried that “the doctrine taught in some of the leading faith-homes” caused “irreparable damage to religion, individuals, and to the peace of churches and families” by persuading visitors to separate themselves from friends and loved ones whose “disbelief” might dampen their faith in God’s healing power. By incorporating inmates within an adoptive family and alternative sacred community, he charged, houses of healing created divisions that threatened existing familial and religious obligations.52
Buckley was especially concerned about the effects of these separations on customary gender norms—a set of prescriptions that were crucial, in his view, for maintaining the healthy families that sustained the broader social structure and advanced the progress of civilization. According to the dictates of the domestic ideology, women were obligated to submit to male authority figures in all social arenas, including the spaces of the sickroom. Within the sacred setting of the faith home, by contrast, invalids like Harriet Barker, Libbie Osborn, and many others found themselves relatively free to make their own choices about how they spent their time, what they ate, and who cared for their bodies. Physically separated from their domestic responsibilities as well as from their fathers, husbands, and male physicians, women experienced a level of independence in houses of healing that, in many cases, contrasted sharply with the limits they encountered in other environments. Encouraging such female autonomy, in Buckley’s view, produced disastrous results. “Advocates of faith-healing and faith-homes have influenced women to leave their husbands and parents and reside in the homes,” Buckley fumed, citing a case of a gentleman whose mother and sister were residing in a faith institution and “neglecting the most obvious duties of life.”53
Testimonies of healing confirm that some individuals who embraced the teachings and practices they learned while sojourning at a house of healing became estranged from their families as a result. After spending several weeks at the residence of a “Christian woman” who “took the sick into her own home and taught and prayed with them,” for example, Anna Prosser returned to her own abode in Buffalo, determined to witness to God’s healing power at work in her body and to renounce the “worldly” and “fashionable” lifestyle that her wealthy parents and siblings pursued. Eventually, Prosser’s efforts to live out her convictions and to convert her relatives alienated her young stepmother—a practicing Spiritualist medium who, in a fit of anger, commanded Prosser to leave the house. When Prosser’s father begged his daughter to moderate her behavior, she replied, “Father I know that my highest earthly duty is to you, but there is one still higher, and if those two duties conflict I must choose the higher.” A few days later, Prosser left home. Soon after setting up residence in rented rooms, she quit the “fashionable” Episcopal church in which she had been raised and transferred her membership to the Methodists.54
Prosser’s story shows that claiming divine healing and acting faith did sometimes disrupt family relationships and provoke changes in church loyalties, just as Buckley feared. For women like Prosser, Barker, and numerous others, visits to faith homes facilitated internal transformations that prompted them to bump up against, stretch, and even contravene the medical and cultural norms that characterized women as naturally and necessarily weak, domestic, submissive, and sick. After taking “the blessing of healing from the Lord” during her stay at Faith-Rest Cottage in March of 1884, for example, Carrie Bates experienced a “buoyancy of health” that enabled her to engage in “mission work in New York City,” undertake a three-year course of study at the New York Missionary Training College, and serve as matron at Judd’s faith home for a summer. Five and a half years after her first trip to “dear Faith Rest Cottage,” Bates parted from her loved ones and journeyed to India, where she worked as a missionary of the Christian Alliance until her death in 1909. No longer convinced that being a model Christian—and especially a model Christian woman—meant passively accepting sickness as a blessing sent by God for her benefit, Bates got out of bed and engaged in activities that would have seemed both improper and impossible prior to her visit to a house of divine healing.55
Helen Dawlly pursued a similar course. Following a one-and-a-half-year stint as matron of Judd’s Faith-Rest, Dawlly decided to attend a training college for missionaries with the hopes of joining the Faith Mission in Akola, India. “The question came up instantly about my duty to my parents if I went into mission work,” Dawlly later recalled. “If they became sick must I leave my work and come back to nurse them?” Turning to Psalm 45:10–11, “Forget thine own people and thy father’s house; so shall the king greatly desire thy beauty; for He is thy Lord and worship thou Him,” Dawlly determined that proclaiming the good news of the gospel—a message that, in her view, included the redemption of both body and soul—took precedence over maintaining familial bonds or fulfilling domestic duties.56
Not all women who visited faith homes attained or even aspired to the levels of leadership and public ministry that Helen Dawlly, Carrie Bates, and Anna Prosser achieved after their stays in these sacred venues. Far more frequently, women reported that being healed enabled them to fulfill the familial, religious, and social duties that they had felt compelled to neglect during their illnesses. The ability to return home and to engage in household work such as cooking, laundry, and caretaking following a period of respite at a house of healing was commonly offered as evidence of a cure. Cases like these suggest that experiencing divine healing did not always lead women to challenge, or even to question, the social and cultural norms that equated true womanhood with maternity and domesticity. For some individuals, visits to faith homes reinforced, rather than unsettled, conventional gender ideologies. Regardless of whether they used their newfound health and strength to pursue projects that satisfied or upset societal expectations, however, women who espoused the devotional ethic they encountered in houses of healing did subvert longstanding and persistently influential associations between female sanctity and passive resignation to physical suffering. Rejecting the role of the retiring female invalid as well as the restrictive prescriptions of the rest cure, women like Dawlly and Bates, as well as their more conventional sisters, sidestepped these sets of expectations by adopting a model of spiritual experience that esteemed active service rather than long-suffering endurance.
For Harriet Barker, and for many other women and men, houses of healing served as important way-stations along the road to mental transformation, physical rejuvenation, spiritual wholeness, and, in some cases, life-changing endeavor. Within the sacred spaces of faith homes like Berachah, Bethshan, and Faith-Rest Cottage, sick persons observed alternative perspectives on the problem of pain and witnessed different methods of coping with affliction. Separated from skeptical critics and pessimistic doctors as well as from the responsibilities and cultural pressures that characterized their everyday worlds, guests at these establishments were surrounded instead with believers who persuaded them to abandon modes of thinking and acting that kept them bedridden, to embrace the promises of healing contained in the Bible, and to embody a manner of living that linked holiness with the energetic pursuit of purity and service.
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