The following testimony appears in the first edition of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, published in 1875, page 352:   "A lady at Louisiana wrote: - Your wonderful science is proved to me.  I was a helpless sufferer six long years, confined to my bed, unable to sit up one hour in the long, long twenty-four. All I know of my cure is this; the day you received my letter I felt a change pass over me, I sat up the whole afternoon, went to the table with my family at supper, and have been growing better every day since; I call myself well. Jenny R. Coffin.”

​

The Louisiana lady was writing to Mary Baker Eddy who was living near Boston, MA. Before founding the worldwide Christian Science Church, Mrs. Eddy had various connections with New Orleans, such as writing a poem about Andrew Jackson’s victory at the Battle of New Orleans, and corresponding with Benjamin Butler, who became the city’s first Union General during Reconstruction. *